The Insult
Bai Jingyan had come to the training grounds simply to hold her place there for the day. She sat atop the high platform reading through documents, leaving the entire business of drilling the recruits to Bai Jingping and Shen Anzhong.
It was only the first day, and things had been rough going. Yet when meat was served at the midday meal, the people erupted into cheers of delight.
Bai Jingping made a point of announcing that from now on, anyone who took part in the training would eat meat at every single meal, and could eat until they were full. Only a man with a full belly, he said, could train hard and drive out the bandits.
Those who had planned to merely coast through the days looked at that hearty spread and felt their hearts catch fire at the thought that if they performed well, they might even carry meat home to their families. Their chests swelled, and quite suddenly their fighting spirit blazed to life.
Bai Jingyan watched from the corner of her eye, observing closely the men Shen Anzhong had brought with him. The way they put the recruits through their drills marked them as men who had spent years in an army camp.
Two of them in particular drew her careful attention — their methods of training raw soldiers bore a resemblance to those of the Bai Family Army, and that planted a seed of suspicion.
In the afternoon the people threw themselves into the drills with even greater fervor. They were caked head to toe in sweat, yet not one of them grumbled about the hardship.
When the sun sank toward the western hills, Bai Jingping and Shen Anzhong selected the three who had performed best and the three who had performed worst. The three best performers carried their meat away in triumph. The three worst, now barred from the training grounds, lingered at the thought of the food they would be missing, begging and pleading and swearing they would try harder tomorrow.
Bai Jingping's heart softened at their pleading, and he was about to seek Bai Jingyan's opinion when Shen Anzhong spoke first.
"The rules are the rules. These three gave their best today, but their bodies simply couldn't keep up. Even if they stayed today, when the time comes to hunt down the bandits, they could lose their lives at the tip of a blade — so going home is the wiser choice! Moreover, the Bai family is providing the silver and the provisions here. We are not doing this to feed idle mouths."
Hearing this, Bai Jingyan was reassured. She closed her book, rose to her feet, and without a word departed with her guards in tow.
Bai Jingping turned his head to watch her go. He could tell that she approved of Shen Anzhong's words.
At the sight, a smile touched Shen Anzhong's lips. The moment he realized his father had sent him here in order to catch the Zhenguo Commandery Princess's eye, pride welled up inside him.
He wanted to prove that his father's choice had not been a mistake.
Shen Anzhong ordered his subordinates to help the top performers carry their meat home, then dismissed the rest and sent them back to camp. Only after that did he exchange farewells with Bai Jingping and head home.
The three who had left the training grounds, unable to keep pace with the training, began spreading word about everything connected to the place.
Even people who had never given a thought to joining the militia heard that if they went there, they would not only eat their fill but get meat at every meal. And that was not all. When word spread that the three best performers were rewarded with meat they could bring home to feed their families, greed stirred in every heart.
Yet when crowds hurried to the training grounds to ask, they were told that this round of recruitment had already closed. Instead, they learned that since anyone who could not keep up would inevitably be sent away once the soldiers were drilled, recruitment would open again if their numbers fell short.
Everyone who had come asking went home disappointed, all of them resolving to be first in line the moment the Zhenguo Commandery Princess recruited again. Perform well, and they could feed their families meat; perform poorly, and they would still keep their own bellies full. As far as they were concerned, it was a fine bargain.
Bai Jingyan appeared at the training grounds three days running. Each day she sent the three who could not keep up out the gate, and each day she rewarded the three best with meat.
Those who left the camp looked back with regret, then began telling their neighbors all about the food and treatment the camp provided.
News that the camp fed its recruits well and even gave them a chance to provide for their families traveled from one mouth to ten, from ten to a hundred. Before long, people from neighboring counties were coming to the Bai estate in Suyang asking when they would be recruiting again.
On the twentieth day of the fifth month, Xiliang delivered every last indemnity it owed Great Jin as the price of its defeat in the Southern Border war. Beyond that, because Xiliang's Princess Pingyang, Li Tianfu, had plotted to kill the Zhenguo Commandery Princess after marrying into the Crown Prince's household, another substantial sum of silver had been paid in recompense. Among it all were rare and extraordinary treasures sent specifically to the Zhenguo Commandery Princess, framed as both an apology and a gesture of comfort for a princess who must have been sorely frightened.
Among the procession transporting the goods, one Xiliang envoy with a particularly cunning mind hatched a scheme: to leak abroad both the manifest of gifts sent to the Zhenguo Commandery Princess and the manifest of gifts sent to the Crown Prince in apology. The Emperor and Crown Prince of Jin naturally came to learn the contents, and discovered that Xiliang had sent the Commandery Princess several times more than it had sent the Crown Prince.
Reading over the gift manifests, the Emperor and the Crown Prince exchanged a thin smile.
The Emperor looked at his son and asked,
"Do you understand what the Xiliang envoy is after?"
The Crown Prince rose hastily and answered.
"If I may venture a guess, the envoy seeks to drive a wedge between me and the Commandery Princess, hoping I will harbor resentment toward her."
The Emperor nodded, his face showing approval.
"On the surface it seems a worthless little trick, but it is a remarkably useful one."
Gazing at his son, the Emperor spoke with rare candor.
Long ago, the state of Liang had tried the very same thing to drive a rift between the Emperor and the Duke of Zhenguo, Bai Weiting. The Emperor had never shown his hand openly, but a knot had formed in his heart all the same. And as Bai Weiting's renown climbed higher with each passing day, that knot had curdled into resentment, swelling by degrees.
"To be honest, when I first saw the manifests, my heart was none too pleased either."
The Crown Prince admitted the truth of it as well.
"But I remember that the Commandery Princess is the very hero who defeated Xiliang. The more Xiliang provokes us, the more determined I am that we must never dance to their tune! We must show the world that sovereign and ministers of our Jin court stand in harmony!
And so I intend, with great fanfare, to send all the various treasures Xiliang sent me on to the Commandery Princess. If they help her raise the militia and root out the bandits, the people will surely remember the benevolence of our imperial house."
The Emperor nodded.
"To reach such a shrewd judgment on your own — you do me credit."
When Bai Jingyan had first announced that she would raise a militia in Suyang to crush the bandits, the Emperor had been suspicious of her. He was so no longer. He had sent men to investigate and learned that nearly all whom she recruited were tenant farmers who had come either to eat meat or to have their rents excused — and even then, their number fell short of a hundred. What grave mischief could possibly come of that?
And if she truly did drive off the bandits, she would merely be solving a headache for the court, at which point he need only bestow a suitable reward.
Even if she failed, the Bai family had provided its own silver — the court would lose nothing.
Afterward, the Crown Prince sent every one of the apology gifts Xiliang had bestowed on him and Bai Jingyan to Suyang. With tremendous fanfare.
When Bai Jingyan heard that the Crown Prince had planted banners and set off firecrackers while shipping all of Xiliang's gifts to Suyang, she arched an eyebrow slightly and ordered Qi Zhengyu to assess the situation — and, if at all possible, to have the gifts the Crown Prince sent secretly robbed in transit.
He had made such a spectacle of sending the gifts — was it not only natural, then, that bandits brazen enough to rob even the Zhenguo Commandery Princess's goods would show no particular reverence for the Crown Prince's?
The report from Mount Chunmu arrived in less than two days. In her early letters, Shen Qingzhu had related that Bai Jinchi was responding with composure. Each day she trained the soldiers under General Zhang Danyue's direction and analyzed the state of the front, and no matter how the Liang soldiers screamed and hurled abuse outside the walls, she never once rose to the bait.
Recently, however, Liang had gotten wind that Bai Jinchi had gone to Mount Chunmu, and began shrieking slanders against the Zhenguo Commandery Princess and the Bai family from outside the fortress walls. As the insults against Bai Jingyan went on and on, Bai Jinchi had nearly stormed out the gates unable to bear it — General Zhang Danyue had stopped her. Whereupon Bai Jinchi had rounded on him in fury, berating him as a contemptible general who feared war.
After reading Shen Qingzhu's letter, Bai Jingyan did as she always did — held it to the candle flame and burned it. Then, lost in thought for a moment, she took up her brush and wrote a letter to Bai Jinchi.
She urged Bai Jinchi to hold her calm: if Liang could not keep its composure and instead dragged the Bai family's name through the mud with curses, it meant they were desperate to end the war quickly — so she must wait patiently until General Zhang Danyue seized his moment.
And she wrote that General Zhang Danyue, being a man of the sword, did not fear war — rather, he cherished the lives of the men under his command and acted with the caution of a careful commander. Bai Jinchi must not overstep and offend him; she should hold him in respect.
Even after the letter was sent, Bai Jingyan could not stop worrying.
Xun Tianzhang was radical and reckless by nature, utterly heedless of fire and water — and yet he had always held the generals of foreign lands in singular respect. He had particularly esteemed the Bai family of Dadu, calling them a house that served loyalty and righteousness to the last. Why, then, would such a man spit out insults so vile?
Once, Xun Tianzhang had named the three people he most respected in all the world.
The first was Empress Hui of Yan. Though a woman, she had made Yan mighty among nations. When her New Policies were first proclaimed, Xun Tianzhang had dismissed them as the ravings of a fever dream — and yet those very "ravings" had lifted the nation's power to extraordinary heights.
The second was Emperor Mingzhao of Jin, founder of the dynasty. Emperor Mingzhao and Bai Yi, progenitor of the Bai clan, had conquered all under heaven together, and sovereign and minister had been as close as blood brothers.
Moreover, Emperor Mingzhao had trusted Bai Yi completely and granted him sweeping authority — Bai Yi, it was said, even held the right to act first and report afterward. Anything that benefited the realm, the Emperor never once rebuked. A man who could embrace a minister who held such power in his hands — one could measure from this alone the boundless breadth of Emperor Mingzhao's spirit.
The third was the Duke of Zhenguo of Jin. The Bai Family Army he led had written itself into legend as invincible. Superb in morale and unmatched in loyalty and daring, they had earned Xun Tianzhang's respect even as his enemies.
That such a man would stoop to vilely slandering the Bai family just to goad Bai Jinchi into sallying forth — could something unforeseen have convulsed the Liang court, forcing him into such desperate measures?
After long deliberation, Bai Jingyan summoned Steward You and had him send word to Xiao Rongyan's men to find out what had happened in the Liang court.
The people Bai Jingyan could move were few, but Xiao Rongyan's merchant houses sprawled across every state — their news would travel far faster than hers.
"Yousu, how does Zeng Xianyu strike you?"
Bai Jingyan asked Steward You.
Steward You nodded with a smile.
"A very useful fellow. He's a man of few words, but when he does open his mouth, he strikes straight at the vital point. He has a good many merits in his own right — steady, and he gives the impression of a man you can truly depend on.
Before Nuo Ping departed, he left me a list of names. He told me to test the loyalty of every man on it, and to determine which ones could be trusted with work later on! A few days ago I tested Zeng Xianyu's loyalty without Master Nuo Ping's leave, and I found him more devoted than I had expected. If you intend to entrust him with the mines, Eldest Miss, I believe he would be an excellent choice."
Before coming to Suyang, Bai Jingyan had told Nuo Ping that he must cultivate more capable hands. That list would have been made up of men Nuo Ping had chosen and chosen again.
Bai Jingyan nodded.
"Yousu, it will mean extra work, but teach Zeng Xianyu what he needs to know. When the time comes, I intend to place that task in his hands."
"Eldest Miss, leave it to me — I'll see him taught properly."
Steward You replied.