My Own Men
My own men.
Several days later, I sought out Tian Feng's residence once more, determined to have an answer to the question I had left with him. Had the weight of it pressed so hard upon that upright scholar? The marks of nights spent in unbroken anguish were plain upon him. His face had grown far thinner and darker than it had been only days before, and I found it difficult to hide my regret.
"Sit."
Tian Feng offered the seat in a spare, level voice. The moment a brief greeting had passed between us, he came straight to the point. That bluntness, cutting in without preamble, was itself proof of how urgently, how fiercely, his mind was churning. I bent every nerve so as not to miss a single word.
"I will speak plainly. As you foresaw, young master, this undertaking is all too likely to end in wretched failure, and the realm will be swept into a blood-soaked age of chaos beyond anyone's control. You have already seen through the dreadful reasons for it, so I will not belabor them. Do you agree with my judgment?"
"I agree entirely."
At my unhesitating answer, Tian Feng's shoulders trembled, ever so slightly. He had expected the reply, and still he could not help but be shaken by the certainty that had come from the mouth of a boy of twelve.
"Should the chaos bite deep, the terrible disorder that attended the fall of the Former Han and the founding of the Later Han will surely return to this land. For mere provincial officials to band together of their own accord and march upon the imperial capital is a thing without precedent. It will sting every other ambitious man in the realm into baring his teeth."
"That is my reading as well. Which is why I am staking everything on gathering men who are wholly mine, and on building the strength to rise through the carnage that is coming."
I looked past the teacup into Tian Feng's gleaming eyes and laid bare what I had kept buried. Into that gaze I poured, unspoken and fierce, the hunger that said, You, too, are one of the men I mean to make my own.
A dry, hollow laugh broke from Tian Feng's lips.
"Heh. Only now do I see your dreadful intent clearly, young master. If the great chaos cannot be stopped, then rather than stand aside you mean to meet the wave of disorder head-on and seize absolute power for yourself. Succeed, and you would wield an authority the Ten Attendants and the General-in-Chief could never so much as approach. Have I guessed rightly?"
"I was born to the foremost great house in the realm, with looks and wit above other men, and I foresaw this blood-reeking age sooner than anyone alive. Born a man, is it not only natural that I should reach for power second only to the sovereign, and above all others?"
For the first time I showed a beast's claws and stated my ambition without shame. The true ambition coiled in the deepest chamber of my heart — the treason of usurping the imperial throne, a crime that would see nine clans exterminated — I kept crushed down beneath cold reason, and hidden.
Tian Feng squeezed his eyes shut as if in pain and let out a short, heavy sigh. Poor at concealing what he felt, he wore his dark brooding openly upon his face.
"I told myself again and again that this must not be, that I must not be swept along... and yet your tender years kept catching at my eye and unsettling my reason. I was endlessly confused, and until now I could not bring myself to a firm decision. But from this hour, everything changes."
His eyes flew open. From those once-composed pupils poured a light as keen and grave as a drawn blade. This was not the calm gaze of a master discoursing upon the classics. It was the fierce spirit of a strategist fit to govern the realm.
"I will not meddle in whatever arises along the bitter road you walk toward the summit of power. I will ask only one thing. Once that power you so hunger for is wholly in your grasp, what do you intend to cast down with it, and what do you intend to raise?"
"I will pacify this disordered realm and restore a firm peace. And I will give all that I am, and the whole of my life, to feeding, clothing, and sheltering the people who hunger and go in rags."
There was not a hair of falsehood in it — a clear, burning sincerity. Tian Feng seemed to feel the weight of that sincerity upon his own skin. He had kept me at his side, taught me with severity, and weighed me with care; he would have read my heart exactly. Never once had he found in me the arrogance that lets a man's counsel in one ear and out the other, nor the cruelty that turns its face from another's suffering.
At last the man who stood straight as bamboo set his thoughts in order. Tian Feng drew his disordered collar neatly closed and corrected his posture with formal gravity. He stepped down from the place of a master who instructed me, and into the place of a man who would aid me.
"Young master. If you truly have need of the meager, stubborn talents of this Tian Feng, will you grant me a place at your side?"
"I thank you from the heart. I honor the weight of your decision to the marrow."
I swallowed the surge of feeling and received him warmly.
"Should this one grow arrogant and set a foot upon the wrong road, I beg you to take up a rod as cold as hoarfrost and give me the bitter counsel that cuts to the bone. I am still lacking in far too much, and I need your help desperately."
"I will carve that wish deep into this breast. What, then, do you require of me?"
As the bond between us was set anew, Tian Feng's manner of address rose to the highest deference. I, for my part, did not relax by a hair, and treated him with the utmost care.
"My years are still too few for me to stand at the front. I ask you to be a stout windbreak for me, and to serve as my guardian."
"That is no difficult thing... save that I am at present a man of the wilds, without so much as a single office, and there are limits to the real force I can bring to bear upon the board of power."
"That force I will make, and I will place it in your hand. I swear it."
I answered with hard emphasis. I knew better than anyone how bitterly my father disliked Tian Feng, and that he had cast the man out. But if I could not even break straight through a rebuke of this order to raise up a single man of my own, what right had I to covet a power that could swallow the realm? I knew full well my father would be furious, and still, for the first time in my life, I resolved to set myself squarely against his will.
Before I entered the administrative hall where my father was staying, I spent several days quietly taking the measure of his mood. The matter I had to settle there was as precarious as walking on thin ice. Go bursting in while his temper was even slightly unsettled, and I would come away with nothing — a thunderous rebuke, and failure, were all too likely.
At last the hour came. Only after a discreet message reached me, that my father's heart lay calm as a still lake, did I make my way lightly toward the hall.
Back when I left Luoyang, I had given Ren Jun and Wen Chou secret instructions: win over the lower officials and officers who labored in obscurity, assisting the civil and military bureaucracy, and make them my hands and feet. The solid fruit of that fierce work beneath the surface stood before my eyes this very day.
"Young master. His Lordship has not raised his voice in anger even once today, and the officials he received brought him no thorny or weighty matters. His mood was so well pleased that he took a light cup of wine, and he smiled and said his body felt easy."
"You have my true thanks, Clerk Li."
Watching Li Feng bend deeply at the waist, I pressed my sincerity into the thanks I offered him.
Li Feng of Julu Commandery, a magnate of a fallen house. Though he was already well into his thirties, his office was no more than that of a clerk on a stipend of two hundred shi — a post so minor it scarcely deserved the name. His days were spent managing the hall's miscellaneous business and running my father's small errands.
By Ren Jun's report, Li Feng was never a man meant to rot as a clerk. He had a remarkable mind and no small store of courage, yet for the single reason that he was not born of a great house, his wings had been broken without mercy and the road of advancement sealed shut. Beyond the deep fatigue in his eyes there flickered a sorrow toward the age, and a desperate thirst to seize any rope that might haul him upward.
"I hear your eldest son recently completed his capping ceremony without mishap."
When I asked it in a gentle voice, Li Feng's shoulders trembled faintly. He swallowed dryly, bowed lower still, as if he might prostrate himself upon the floor, and spoke in a shaking voice.
"Young master... the boy is quick to read a room, and there is something useful in him. If you will forgive a father's thin greed, I beg you to keep him at your side and let him run even the meanest errands. Should he fail, by even a little, to suit your heart... then cast him out without mercy whenever you please. I will bear no grudge."
Li Feng was holding out to me a rough hand that trembled by a hair. At the tips of those fingers gathered a thick, desperate wish: that even if he himself could do nothing, he might open a slightly better future for his son. I was endlessly cold toward my enemies. Toward a man of mine who had staked everything and bowed down before me, I was ready to open a generous embrace.
I took the hand he offered in both of mine, warm and firm.
"What is your son's name?"
"...He is called Hui. The character for radiance, young master."
"Hui, for radiance. A truly fine name. As it happens, I have been in sore need of a clever hand to run errands at my side. Thank you, Clerk Li. I will gladly take the boy in."
The moment my unwavering answer fell, the rims of Li Feng's eyes flushed red. The road was open now; gathering the fruit would depend entirely upon Li Hui's own effort and ability. Overcome, his voice catching, he whispered.
"He is no fool, I swear it. He will not be so much as a speck of hindrance upon the great road before you. Come — please, go in."
Under Li Feng's scrupulous guidance I walked toward the heavy doors of the administrative hall, quietly turning over in my mind the name that would now be one of my own: Li Hui. A son whose father had wagered even his slender office, dear as life itself, and offered him up to me. Would a man as sharp and quick to read a room as Li Feng ever set a dullard at my side and invite his own ruin? The boy would surely have a mind no less remarkable than his father's.
With the feeling of having gained one more stout shield, a satisfied smile spread at the corners of my mouth as I went in to face my father. These were the true loyal men who would fight for me at the risk of their lives.
When I entered the administrative hall, a warm smile bloomed across my father's face, which had been faintly set. It was plain proof that his mood could not have been better.
"Come in, youngest."
"Yes. Is your honored body well?"
"Today I am a good deal easier."
Father smiled lightly and nodded.
In his youth he had kept the three years' mourning twice in succession, and endured a full six years of bitter hardship. He had held himself far from rich meat and got by on fitful sleep, and even beneath the keen eyes of countless scholars and gentlemen of the realm he had been obliged to prove a grief without a single lapse. Those merciless six years had eaten away at his health past all recovery, but in exchange they had stripped off the inborn yoke of a concubine's son and set in his hands a towering fame, so that he might stand unashamed as a leader of the Pure Stream faction.
"So. There is something you must say to me?"
Father asked the purpose of my visit himself — proof that he was busy on the eve of a great undertaking. I could not afford to circle the point any longer and waste his time.
"I have kept Master Tian at my side as my teacher and thrown myself into study. Because of it, my eye for the world has widened, and my learning has grown a good deal deeper. I feel that the scale of my thinking is plainly different from what it was last year."
"Hm..."
Father's brow drew in by a fraction. He still looked thoroughly displeased with that rigid, wearisome man called Tian Feng.
"Did the fellow cling to you so desperately?"
"He did, my lord."
"My lord? When it is only the two of us, call me Father, and call me so warmly."
Before he was a cold man of power, it was a warm rebuke, thick with affection for me.
"Yes, Father. Grant him one small office, and open a road for him into the administrative hall."
At my bold request, Father wore a faint, cool smile.
"You mean to use him to learn, in every particular, how things move inside the Jizhou Inspectorate, and to raise your own voice in earnest. Is that it?"
He did not trust Tian Feng. He did, however, trust completely the uncanny cleverness of his twelve-year-old son.
"It is."
"Impudent brat. And yet, of all the men there are, why must it be Tian Feng?"
"In all Jizhou there is no mind as remarkable as his. And he is a man who wears every feeling openly on his face, so he cannot nurse a second heart in secret. I cannot abide the sly sort who coils like a snake and hides what he intends. As for his stiff nature, which treads carelessly upon a superior's sore spot — I am still young, and his bitter words do not strike me as hateful, nor do they grate."
At my orderly and impudent logic, Father looked up at the ceiling for a moment, lost in thought, and then nodded with ready good grace.
"You were a great help to this father of yours amid the blood-wind of Luoyang. A small, endearing request of this order ought to be granted."
"Come now, Father. Say it warmly instead: 'For this youngest of mine, the apple of my eye, your father will gladly do it!'"
I smiled like an artlessly innocent child and gently thawed the displeasure that Tian Feng's name had stirred in him. Father let out a laugh, as if he hardly knew what to do with me.
"Duoguan Shuzuo. Will that post satisfy you?"
"Thank you — truly, thank you, Father!"
I bowed deeply again and again, all but leaping with joy. Father chided me lightly — was winning a mere post so very delightful? — but the warm smile at his mouth never quite left him.
Duoguan Shuzuo: a grave and fearsome office, charged with inspecting, in every particular, the corruption and malfeasance of the officials within the Jizhou Inspectorate. If Guo Tu, as Junzhen Zongshi, held the throats of the grand administrators and county magistrates on the outer circuit, then Tian Feng would seize the discipline at the very heart of the inspectorate. The real edge of that power was anything but light. It was plain proof that, however much Father disliked Tian Feng's inflexible character, he acknowledged the man's ability and his incorruptibility.
"Come here."
Father opened both arms, drew me into his embrace, and set me upon his firm knee. With a large, rough hand he stroked my head warmly.
"Your father must now leave this city of Ye for a time, to undertake the great work of settling the realm. I can't say whether that will be a matter of months or of years. Your elder brothers will come with me, but our Shang'er is to remain safely in Ye and devote himself to his studies."
"Yes, Father."
"Through this Tian Feng you trust so deeply, I'll take your measure in every particular. How fearsomely our youngest grows while I'm away — this father will watch, and he'll look forward to it."
"I will never disappoint your high expectations!"
When I answered with a bright, sturdy smile, Father wore a look more satisfied and more gentle than at any time before, and drew me deeper into his arms. I loved a father like this.
Please stay healthy for a long, long time, Father.