Yuan Xi
The year turned, and in the first month of 190 I turned twelve at last.
Foolish children are forever fretting to become adults as soon as they can, but my hunger was no such innocent complaint. On the furiously turning board of this chaotic age, I longed with everything in me to shed this small shell even a day sooner and become an adult who held real power, so that I might set my will fully in motion.
Every third day I went to Tian Feng's residence to study, and to argue fiercely over the state of the realm. Each time we spoke, I felt to the bone how immense he was, how absolute. He broke apart my clumsy views and whetted my cold reason to a keen edge. He was, in truth, the finest teacher under heaven.
Whatever time remained I spent entirely on tending my own people. By the brutal logic of power, once bodies grow distant, hearts are bound to follow. Knowing how thin such bonds could be, I summoned my people more often than was strictly wise. Toward enemies beyond my fence I was endlessly cold; toward those who had become mine, I set out warm tea and bent my ear even to the smallest of their voices. That was my own fixed way of looking after my own.
Then, on a quiet afternoon, my second brother Yuan Xi came to my residence.
"Elder Brother has been terribly wary of you lately, and worried besides. I don't see it that way. Our youngest is growing up truly clever and fine. Just keep shooting up like this."
His voice was nothing like our eldest brother Yuan Tan's — no barking, no roughness. A spring breeze sat plain on his face, and nowhere in it could I find the bloodshot ambition that hungers after power. He had the kind eyes of a calf: large of frame, and gentle.
Teacup in hand, I clicked my tongue quietly to myself. Why was I only now truly looking into my second brother's transparent nature? Because I had been gazing at the world through nothing but a greed for power.
"Second Brother ought to help Father soon as well, and raise some great design of your own in Jizhou."
I sounded him with a sidelong word. He laughed, clear and bright, and waved the notion off.
"What design? I just make up the numbers in the administrative hall. With an eldest brother like a tiger, and you, standing so firm, where would there even be a place for me to step forward?"
"I'm only twelve."
I widened my eyes like an artless child and laid it on thick. Yuan Xi set his teacup down slowly.
"Twelve in years, perhaps. But coiled in that belly of yours sits a great old serpent fit to lord it over the realm. When Father unfolds his will someday, you'll be a great help to him, together with Elder Brother."
A chill shot up my spine. For an instant a sharp, bright edge flashed through my second brother's soft, yielding eyes. He had the look of a man who had long since seen perfectly through the mask of an eight-year-old child.
But before I could answer, he braced both hands on his knees, bent forward, and brought his face level with mine. The edge was gone. Only gentleness remained.
"Our youngest — so bright-eyed, and growing at a frightening pace. From now on, help your eldest brother well at his side."
"Then... what do you mean to do, Second Brother?"
"Me? I'll simply drift with the water and enjoy a little refined pleasure. Born the second son of the illustrious Yuan clan, I'll never want for food, clothes, or a roof my whole life, and if I can someday take a beauty of the realm to wife, I'll have nothing left to wish for. The odds of that are excellent. Born a man, luxury of this order is plenty. What would I exhaust myself desiring beyond it?"
With a contented face he stroked my head once, fondly, then left the residence and ambled off, light of step.
Watching that broad back recede, I let out a short sigh. All this time I had kept my senses sharp, treating him too as an unseen rival in waiting — and it had been entirely my mistake. That gentle manner was no sinister cunning, artfully hiding what lay within. A man who, even in history, never left a clear mark to the very end. With that clever head he read the current of the age, and still he himself stepped aside from the mire of power. It was true freedom from desire.
Thank goodness. In this hideous mud-fight, where bone and flesh fly, at least Second Brother will stand clear and stay unentangled. He'll probably marry a daughter of the Zhen clan. How old would she even be? Second Brother is still unwed, so she must be young. He'll manage well enough on his own.
I, in any case, would not shrink from soaking myself in the filthy water of power. Before long a cruel hour would come when I had to tear at my eldest brother Yuan Tan over that power, and I would not hesitate. If Yuan Xi stood with me then, he would be strength beyond measure; even if he merely kept his quiet neutrality, as he did now, it would be nothing but good fortune for me.
That I must fight my own brother of the same blood as if to the death stabbed at a corner of my chest. But I soon pressed the feeling down with cold reason and shook my head. Born into an age of chaos swept by a wind of blood, I was no different from a beast aiming for the highest, most brilliant seat under heaven. How could I take that vast throne into my arms without blood on my hands — without a single ache in my heart? My power would flower, without remainder, upon blood and tears.
It was a winter in which a savage north wind, cutting to the bone, refused to ease — and yet, deep within the administrative hall where Yuan Shao resided, a heat strange in its intensity was rising. Through the gates of Ye, messengers caked in dust came and went without rest, dozens of times in a single day. It was a tense, lethal scene that could not even have been imagined in the days of the previous Inspector.
The officials and generals who were as my own hands and feet knew nothing of the vast design unfolding beyond the hall's thick doors. The matter was so grave that security was ironclad, and only a bare handful of high officials whom Yuan Shao deeply trusted took part and shared what they knew.
Before I secretly gathered my people at my residence, I went first to Tian Feng, seeking counsel.
With his usual neat bearing he offered me a warm seat for tea, and nothing closer than that. He would not wholly declare himself mine, yet he left a thread by which stratagem might be shared at any time — a distance as clean, and as thoroughly calculated, as the man himself. Beneath it, though, hid a warmth, as if he were facing a young son. And I felt he had drawn nearer to me than before. For that reason I always honored Tian Feng, kept a disciple's courtesy toward my teacher, and followed him.
"Master Tian. Do you happen to know of the secret matters unfolding in the administrative hall of late?"
I cast the line out lightly. Tian Feng paused with his teacup half-raised and answered, unruffled.
"How should an old man, pushed in loneliness into the back room of power, know designs so deep? Even you, young master, give no sign of knowing — so word of it could hardly have reached me. Have you heard something apart from that?"
He truly seemed not to know. Well, I only guessed because I remembered the history of my previous life in full. How could I have read that vast board by piercing security as tight as this?
"His Lordship is secretly gathering the inspectors and grand administrators of Guandong into a league, and preparing a great undertaking to drive Dong Zhuo out of Luoyang in a single stroke. Those countless messengers riding without rest are the plain proof of it."
The corner of Tian Feng's eye trembled, ever so slightly. He hid a great shock and did his best to carry the talk forward with gravity.
"Hmm... A secret held so close — you, young master, who cannot even enter the hall, how on earth did you come to know it?"
"The principle is not difficult. In Luoyang, His Lordship suffered an insult at Dong Zhuo's hands that can never be washed clean, and he swore he would take that man's head in revenge. Beyond that, Dong Zhuo deposed the Son of Heaven at his whim and insulted Heaven itself — a beast in all but name. How could the illustrious Yuan clan of the realm stand idle and watch? There is the great righteous cause: this world, driven in upside down, must somehow be set right. Precisely because that perfect justification exists, countless officials of Guandong gladly stake their lives in answer to His Lordship's call to arms."
Tian Feng sank into a deep, heavy anguish. His once-neat brow twisted grimly, and after a long silence he at last parted his heavy lips. That officials of the provinces should privately form an allied host and dare march upon the imperial capital — this thing without precedent, unheard of in any age — his values could hardly accept.
"Young master."
"Yes. Speak."
"This perilous undertaking... do you truly believe it will succeed?"
"It will by no means be easy."
"May I ask the reason?"
Tian Feng pressed in, sharp. I answered in good order, without a hair of hesitation.
"The spirit of the allied host His Lordship leads may pierce the heavens, but in the end it is only a league of scattered sand — officials gathered up from every direction. There is no chance their command will be made perfectly one. Dong Zhuo, by contrast, has stacked real experience through countless battles since Liangzhou, and he controls the elite troops under him as if they were his own limbs, in perfect order."
Tian Feng fell to thinking again, then recalled the General of the Rear, Yuan Shu, and asked after him. If it were Yuan Shu, he would surely contend with Yuan Shao over command. Tian Feng knew well enough how vicious the relations between the two were.
"Perhaps... you are concerned about the General of the Rear?"
"You see it exactly. The more His Lordship seeks to seize the lead, the less the General of the Rear will yield, and they will surely fall to quarreling. The allied host will in the end be torn in two at the least — no, into more than that."
To soothe the fierce anger of the scholar-gentry and the great clans, Dong Zhuo had recommended men of renown to high office, and in that process Yuan Shu was appointed General of the Rear. Dong Zhuo had not thought this far. The result, all the same, was to drain Yuan Shao's strength.
"That outstanding eye of yours, young master... it is truly astonishing. I have clicked my tongue at your insight many times before, but today I cannot even gauge its limit. I find myself deeply afraid."
The one inwardly shocked was rather me. In a back room where information was blocked this thoroughly, from nothing but the fragmentary clues I had thrown him, he had at once put his finger even on the blind spot of Yuan Shu's breakaway. Tian Feng, too, was a true genius, seeing through the board of this hideous age with a precision that raised the hair.
"I would ask only one thing more."
Tian Feng's voice sank, heavy as thunder.
"As you say, the chance of wretched failure far outweighs success, and it is clear as day that the realm will fall into a bloody chaos no one can check. Why, then, do you not go to His Lordship and strive to persuade him with all your heart? If you truly stood for the realm and the people, then even should you suffer a rebuke like thunder and be cast out, you ought to seize him by the trouser-leg and hang on! And yet you only stand by and watch... Surely not..."
Tian Feng's once-composed face hardened into something grim, and in the eyes fixed on me a bright flame of suspicion and shock leapt up. He was a man who did not know how to hide what he felt, and so the anger born of a dreadful imagining lay bare across his face.
"Young master. Could it be... that in your heart you wish this undertaking to fail completely?"
Struck dead center, I swallowed a cold sweat within, but outwardly I held to a soft, unshaken reason.
"How, as a son, could I wish His Lordship to bleed and fail? Of course I pray more earnestly than anyone that this vast righteous cause succeed in brilliance. But to prepare, in silence, for the aftermath of a horrific failure should one come — that, I do not doubt, is the proper charge a man who lives through this hellish age must bear."
"To my eyes... it only seems that you, young master, are cunningly waiting upon that terrible failure. And that in the course of it you are aiming at something... which I cannot begin to guess."
Tian Feng did not yield an inch, upright as a bamboo rod. He laid his fierce thoughts and his raw feeling bare upon his face, transparent as a pane of glass, and with them came a dreadful persistence and a bluntness of speech. That, surely, was why Father could not keep so outstanding a genius at his side — why he had found the man uncomfortable and cast him out in the end. Had Father seized Jizhou by intrigue, as in the history of my previous life, he would have forced an embrace on Tian Feng, a son of Jizhou, if only to soothe the people's hearts. But now Father governed Jizhou on a perfect and rightful pretext, and so he had naturally thrust aside this uncomfortable rod of integrity, who kept touching the sore scale of his pride.
I knew full well the realm would fall into hideous misery. But I had to grow my own power amid that chaos, and so I could not bring myself to spit out, with my own mouth, the cruel truth that I wanted the failure.
"I cannot split my insides open and show them to you, and my own feelings are stifling beyond words. Had I been granted the standing to sit in the deep councils of the hall, I would have set this bloody concern before them with perfect clarity. But as you know, Master Tian, I have not even set foot across the hall's threshold. I cannot presume to step forward on fragmentary information alone. And this is only my conjecture, not the precise substance. I myself do not know exactly what is happening inside the hall."
At that orderly, realistic protest, the glare with which Tian Feng had been striking at me slowly eased.
"...This person's thinking was shallow. Anger ran ahead of me, and I spat out a slip of the tongue that cannot be washed away. Forgive me."
With a dark face, deep wrinkles set in it, Tian Feng bowed his head in formal apology. His unbending shoulders were weighed down in earnest dread of the vast disorder about to come upon the realm.
"An apology is uncalled for. Master Tian. If... the worst calamity I fear should come to pass, how ought someone as lacking as I conduct himself then?"
Tian Feng seemed to sink once more into a sea of deep thought. He turned the teacup slowly in his hands, then opened his mouth with care.
"It is hard to answer so weighty a question at once. Might I give you that answer... after I have thought on it? This person's mind is in such confusion that I would like to end our talk for today."
"I will wait whenever you are ready. Thank you again for so deep a teaching, Master Tian."
"Grant me only a few days' grace."
"I will await word."
Inwardly I had hoped for a refreshing answer on the spot, but even this was a harvest almost too rich. Even Tian Feng, a genius bestowed by Heaven, holding only shards of rigidly controlled information, could hardly have drawn the solution to the whole board in a single breath. It would have been near impossible.
I had startled him, but there was still a long road ahead. Through the matter now underway, I had to make Tian Feng wholly mine. Father, and the chief officials and generals with him, would all depart for Luoyang — and so this would be an opportunity all the more precious, and all the more important, to me.