To Ye
Liyang City.
The moment I reached the walls I went straight to the administrative office, drew the writing desk close, and set myself to composing two letters with painstaking care. When the wax seals were pressed firm, I summoned Zhao Yun.
"This letter is for Shen Rong, the gatekeeper who holds Ye's city gate. The other is for Clerk Li Feng, who keeps the provincial court. Both must be delivered in the utmost secrecy. Can you manage it?"
"If the matter bears Sima Yuan's unbending will, then it must be done. I will choose close-mouthed, seasoned riders from the camp and send them to Ye at once."
"I trust only you, Rider-Commandant Zhao."
"And yet, Sima Yuan—are you truly certain it is wise to leave your post like this?"
"Why would it not be?"
"The Heishan Bandits may break their oath and rise at any moment. Worse, His Lordship may cut down this willful course of yours with a single stroke."
"The Heishan will not stir so easily. Even so, against that chance, you will remain here and keep every variable in hand. As for His Lordship, I will persuade him even if it costs me my life. More than that—I mean to make those bandits subjects of the Jizhou Inspectorate, and at the same time a force wholly my own."
A shock too deep to hide passed across Zhao Yun's steadfast face. I only smiled, faintly. I had no particular wish for him to understand the game I was playing. Having just endured Guo Tu's contemptible scheme, I had simply come to see, with perfect clarity, that if I meant to cut through this brutal age I would need a power that was overwhelming—and mine alone.
"Summon Colonel Wen and Military Sima Zhao here at once. Before I leave for Ye, I will issue my orders without ambiguity. Oh—and call Recorder Gao as well."
"By your command."
Zhao Yun acknowledged with a heavy bow and withdrew.
I closed my eyes and calmly set the political board awaiting me in Ye into precise order, snipping the tangled knots one after another and working out, down to the fine arithmetic, how I would answer if something unforeseen broke loose. I was just deciding that this would do.
"I hear you mean to go to Ye yourself."
Gao Gan was the first to come running, and he put the question the instant he stepped into the office. He was a man of great ambition and sharp wits, yet as yet he bore me no clear ill will. He was only a civil official blindly faithful to my father.
"Yes, Elder Brother. I must see Father myself and persuade him of how matters stand. For the greater prosperity of our Jizhou Inspectorate."
"Prosperity. And under that pretext, you don't also mean to swell your own faction into something enormous?"
"Elder Brother. In private you are my maternal cousin, but do not presume to read my intentions with so shallow a measure. To prejudge my conduct and speak of it so freely is to overstep your place. In time it will be plain enough which of us climbs higher. Conduct yourself with restraint."
I poured the rebuke over Gao Gan deliberately. He had tried to wield private kinship as a weapon and set himself above me, the man who held command of Liyang's army. If I did not check that arrogant ambition now, it might one day become an obstacle to the great work.
Met with my cold authority, Gao Gan started and took an involuntary step back. He had known in his head that I was chillingly mature and ruthless for my years, yet he was, after all, the elder cousin; he had not expected to be trampled quite so mercilessly.
"While I am away in Jizhou, Elder Brother, you need only remain here and faithfully discharge the duty Father assigned you."
Just then heavy footfalls announced Zhao Yun, Wen Chong, and Zhao Du. The three generals entered the office and offered crisp military salutes. Discontent still flickered across Gao Gan's face, but my rebuke had not been wrong, and he kept his mouth shut.
If words will not make him understand, then he must be cut away without mercy. In the history I remember, the moment the Yuan clan's power declined, Gao Gan at once sought to stand as his own faction and betrayed them. He failed wretchedly and met an empty death, yet the snake of ambition in his belly, and the ability that went with it, were anything but slight. On the day I hold Jizhou's power entire, I will never again give him so much as a chance to grasp military command. I will see him spend his life shuffling from one administrative post to another until he grows old. That is the road by which everyone survives.
I hid that thought and turned a warm, trusting gaze upon the three generals who offered their loyalty without wavering.
"I depart shortly for Ye with my guards. I mean to report the situation in Liyang to my father without a hair of falsehood, and I mean to persuade him. I do not believe the Heishan Bandits will take up arms and run riot at once, but if they show any sign of it, reason with them first. If they still will not submit to control, crush them without hesitation. Whatever comes of it on the field, I will bear the whole of the responsibility."
"Sima Yuan. We already hold the piece called Sun Qing, and they have received the pledge and the gifts you granted them. They will not raise any great trouble."
Wen Chong answered with a loyal, steady face.
"They had better not. That is precisely why we have bled ourselves dry over this contest of wits. In any case, while I am away the three of you must hold Liyang fast. I am counting on you."
"Go and return in safety! We will do everything in our power to keep the whole of Liyang at peace!"
Wen Chong spoke for the three, acknowledged the order, and gave a military salute. I offered my people a few warm words of encouragement, then, under the stern escort of a hundred elite cavalry, swung my crop and rode hard for Ye.
When I reached Ye, Shen Rong, the gatekeeper who commanded the city gate, was already waiting and received me with formal courtesy. The unwavering look in his eyes and the set of his face told me at a glance that he was wholly mine.
"Sima Yuan. Junzhen Zongshi Guo has not left Ye even once this year."
The moment we had moved somewhere few people passed, Shen Rong delivered his report in a confidential voice.
"Of course he hasn't. A cunning man does not dirty his own hands with mud."
"Even so, his office is a weighty one—he inspects the grand administrators and county magistrates of the Jizhou Inspectorate—so the clerks who serve as his hands have been in and out of the gate at all hours. There are so many of them that catching each one out is..."
"Sweep the small fry aside. Among Guo Tu's closest men, has anyone moved in secret, differently from his usual habit?"
Shen Rong searched his memory for a moment, then answered with certainty.
"There is one. A man named Zhang Fan, a fellow townsman of Director Guo from Yingchuan Commandery. Since this autumn he has slipped out of the city twice, once in the first month of the season and once in the second. Each time he was gone more than ten full days, and each time he quietly loaded a heavy chest of unknown contents onto a cart and left. It was suspicious enough that I ought to have searched him. But Director Guo's authority is so towering that I could not bring myself to open it. I am ashamed."
It was a choice I could well understand. A gatekeeper's post was not so low, but it was nothing beside a Junzhen Zongshi. I understood his reluctance to make an enemy of Guo Tu. At the same time I crowed in triumph inwardly.
Found him. Take that Zhang Fan alive, and I have Guo Tu by the throat.
The heavy chest Zhang Fan had carted out of the city—that was the gold and silver sent to the Heishan Bandits to have them threaten me. It could be nothing else.
"Is this Zhang Fan in the city now?"
"That is... yesterday, at dusk, he left in a great hurry, looking badly shaken. He said he was running a private errand for Director Guo, back to his home in Yingchuan."
A jolt went through me. Gao Gan had reported directly to my father from Liyang, and word of the suppression must have reached Guo Tu's ear. Sensing that the campaign against the Heishan would end in my complete victory, Guo Tu had feared his tail would be stepped on and had frantically sent Zhang Fan, the key witness, fleeing all the way to Yingchuan.
I closed my eyes and calculated the escape route with care.
To run from Ye to Yingchuan in Yuzhou, he must cross the Yellow River. For that he has no choice but to use the Wushajin ferry, where boats come and go without end. Ji Ying, Pass-and-Ford Commandant of Wushajin.
When I had left Luoyang with my father and come to Ye, we had passed through the Wushajin landing. Ren Jun, the Diannong Sima who had become my man and now managed Jizhou's agriculture, had himself once been Port Chief at Wushajin. Ji Ying, the Pass-and-Ford Commandant who oversaw the landing, was a man who had sworn loyalty to my father early on. He knew very well how dearly my father cherished me. He had given that loyalty in hope of advancement, so I was certain he would grant my request. Besides, Wushajin was forever packed shoulder to shoulder with commoners and merchants waiting to cross. A wait of several days was nothing unusual. If I sent swift riders now, I was sure I could still seize Zhang Fan by the nape of the neck there.
"Gatekeeper Shen. Lend me a writing desk for a moment."
"Yes, Sima Yuan. This way."
Guided by Shen Rong, I stepped into the office, drew the desk to me, and wrote a personal letter for Ji Ying. At the end of the blunt lines I pressed the seal of the Acting Sima down hard, then sealed the envelope with care.
"Among your men, is there anyone who knows Zhang Fan's face exactly?"
"Yes. Several."
"Choose the one with the sharpest eye and the tightest mouth. Send him at once with my escort cavalry to the Wushajin landing. He is to be taken. The man is a criminal who has offended against the Jizhou Inspectorate and is now in flight."
"Understood!"
Shen Rong flinched at the word crime, but he acknowledged the order at once and left the office. I walked out slowly and quietly called over the cavalry captain who had been guarding me. The man in charge of ten elite riders was a subordinate general of Zhao Yun, and a fellow townsman of his: Xiahou Lan. He looked better suited to civil office than to arms, yet with neither a powerful patron nor a respectable house behind him he had never been able to spread his talents, and had drifted from one junior military post to another.
"Xiahou Lan. Take this letter and the guide, ride for the Wushajin landing at once, and bring Zhang Fan back alive. Alive. That is essential."
"By your command!"
Xiahou Lan sensed the weight of the task and accepted it with a resolute face. I placed the letter in his hands with firm trust, and he left Ye together with the man Shen Rong had attached to him. The winner of the game between Guo Tu and me would be decided by Xiahou Lan.
Now I had to meet Clerk Li Feng, who kept the provincial court, and learn how the inside of the Jizhou Inspectorate had turned while I was away. And then I would meet Guo Tu, the man who had laid a hideous trap at my back.
"Gatekeeper Shen, thank you. Thanks to you, the matter is well in hand."
At the sincere praise, Shen Rong bent deeply at the waist.
"I am truly glad to have been of even a little help to Sima Yuan. Please, come inside."
"I will be counting on you hereafter as well."
I encouraged him, then went straight to the provincial court to find Li Feng.
Set a little aside from the provincial court, in a tucked-away corner, a single small and shabby room served as Clerk Li Feng's office.
"Sima Yuan! You have returned safely. The campaign must have been a great labor. The place is humble, but please, sit here."
"Thank you."
I sat in the plain, worn wooden chair he had wiped with his sleeve. A few brushes, an inkstone, a stick of ink, and bamboo slips—that was the whole of the austere room. As I looked it over, Li Feng carefully set a bowl of warm plain water before me.
"A man of your station ought to be offered fragrant tea, at the very least..."
"It's quite all right."
I knew perfectly well that buying the costly leaves the great clans enjoyed was a thing a mere clerk's meager stipend dared not even dream of. To spare my man the embarrassment, I deliberately took the bowl in both hands, drank the water with relish, and set it down without a sound.
"While I was away, what was the mood of the court?"
"Opinion is split clean down the middle. They praise with one voice the surrender of the thirty thousand Heishan you brought over, calling it a great merit that will be of immense help to the Inspectorate. At the same time, deep in most officials' hearts, a doubt has coiled itself: can we truly trust to the end, and take in, bandits who lived by plunder and murder? His Lordship has shown nothing on the surface, but inwardly he seemed deeply troubled by their savagery."
"What did Director Guo say?"
"He opposed it the most fiercely. For the moment, he said, they are pressed flat beneath Sima Yuan's momentum and will lie quiet, but before long they will show their true nature and drown the whole of Liyang in blood. He poured out that cold warning in open court."
"...I see."
I stroked my chin and turned Li Feng's meticulous report over in my mind.
"Sima Yuan. May I presume to offer one word, though it is only this humble clerk's narrow and worn opinion?"
"Speak as freely as you like. I will listen."
Li Feng had spent more than ten years in this very court of the Jizhou Inspectorate, assisting its officials. He was as good as a living witness to the rise and fall of power here, and I was certain that advice drawn from that experience would be of great use to me.
"Seen in the large, I believe Sima Yuan's insight is sound—the wish to take the Heishan in and settle them as common people. Even those beastlike bandits did not first take up the knife because they longed to be outlaws. Most of them were only pitiful farmers, driven to the cliff's edge when famine and the extortion of corrupt officials left them no way to live, and they turned to banditry to keep their wives and children alive."
"..."
"The habits of beasts remain in them, so at the start they will surely raise disturbances, great and small, that call for blood. Even so, do not withdraw your patience. Show them grace to the very end. Once the grace that took away their hunger has sunk into the bone, they will gladly call themselves your loyal hands. A bond forged by sharing life and death from the very bottom is tougher than any alliance, so tough that no blade in the world can ever cut it."
"Truly... that is precious counsel, and it moves me. I will carve it deep into my heart."
It was insight of a rare order, the kind no one could dare speak without long survival in an age of chaos and a deep reading of men.
"Will you seek a private audience with His Lordship at once, then?"
"No. I mean to see Director Guo before I see His Lordship. He is frantic for a chance to devour me, so this time I will meet him and teach him to watch his tongue. How am I to keep my mind on anything else with that itch in my ear?"
"Please be careful. He has already taken the side opposite yours, and he carries a naked blade."
Not a real blade, I thought. He meant a hostility that sharp.
"How can you be so certain?"
"For more than ten years I have lived in this court, thin ice under every step, watching the faces of men above me and taking the measure of their moods. All that remains to an old, shabby man like me is this graying hair and a sense for such things. I have caught the scent of it: Director Guo is moving his fellow townsman, that Zhang Fan, and plotting some filthy scheme against you. You must catch him."
"I am truly grateful. I have already sent cavalry in haste."
"As expected."
Admiration broke from Li Feng. I felt the same for the breadth of his network and the keenness of his eye. Through him I had long kept a close weave of Ye's lesser officials and its channels of information, and he had just proved, with loyal thoroughness, that my eye for men had not been wrong.
"I am sincerely sorry for it. If this clerk's house had been only a little more respectable, he would have shed the shell of a mere clerkship and become a great tree with the power to sway the world."
"Aigoo! Perish the thought, Sima Yuan! This humble clerk will be grateful all his life merely to keep the post he has. I am only an old man who cannot devise a single scheme clever enough to overturn the board, surviving by watching the moods of those above him. Such excessive praise leaves me nowhere to put myself."
Afraid that the counsel he had given might now be seen in a poor light, Li Feng waved both hands in haste. I stepped quietly closer and closed my hands around his two rough, wrinkled ones.
"Clerk Li. Please take care of your health. Ten years. Endure just ten years more, and a day will surely come when I rule this Jizhou Inspectorate. When that day arrives, I will seat you at my side and put you to weighty use. I will not fail in it."
"Sima Yuan... sob... I will serve you with all my heart!"
Clutching my hands, Li Feng bent deeply at the waist, and hot tears burst from him. Even if the promise was an empty, extravagant courtesy, it did not matter to him. For an old junior official who had spent a lifetime tumbling through this ruthless arena of power, it was the first time anyone had pledged him a future while still holding the warmth of a living hand.