The Frontier Was Always at War
The Bing Province that Cai Yong found when he came to Wuyuan Commandery was nothing like the place he had pictured in Luoyang.
They were already at war!
He had known this was a frontier where foreigners outnumbered the Han, where livestock outnumbered people. He had always thought of it as a poor country, a barren country. But that understanding had never left the surface of a desk.
Whether Luoyang chooses war or not — the frontier has always been fighting like this!
Messenger reports. News of raids that arrived only as ink on paper. In the courts of Luoyang he had listened and thought how tragic it was, how it pained the heart. What now unfolded before Cai Yong's eyes was worse than any of that.
The common people are worn to the bone.
Every household had someone who had been hauled off to a battlefield. Word that a man had "fallen in battle" was almost a mercy. If you could not know where or in what manner the body was rotting, the family's own insides rotted with it.
No — if you could simply forget and go on living, that would have been fortune enough. When the news came that someone had been taken prisoner, the mere imagining of what brutal shape they might be in, how wretched their fate, scorched a family's heart like a riverbed gone to drought.
After enough of those stories, even word that people in some other village had been plundered by the Xianbei, butchered by them, was met with a dull quiet.
They have given up. They do not think about a month from now. They do not even think about ten days from now.
They were living one day at a time, nothing more. And so when conflict broke out among them, it raced straight to the extreme — tearing at one another until someone was dead. The feud between Xiongnu and Han was the worst of it.
If a Hu family's livestock so much as stray onto a field, the Han howl that it is a scheme to steal their land. The Hu never go hungry — they have meat and milk. But if a Han farm loses its crop, they starve where they stand.
A difference at the root of how the two peoples lived. That was where the conflict began.
And the Hu rage in turn — that the Han ruin perfectly good pasture by turning it into fields, that they keep worming their way in and pushing the plow farther every year. The yamen takes the Han side more often than not.
The Xianbei attacks that came every year were trouble enough. But Cai Yong found himself thinking that at this rate, Bing Province itself would become one vast whirlpool of war.
The thought ran a chill through him.
And if this is not happening only in Bing Province? If it is happening in Liang Province, in You Province as well?
If the three frontier provinces — Liang, Bing, and You — collapsed all at once? That would mean the borders of the Han had fallen. And that, soon enough, would mean the fall of the Han itself.
So Cai Yong went to see the Great Wall.
More precisely, he went to see what had once been the Great Wall.
This is the true face of the Wall that once boasted of spanning ten thousand li?
Save for a handful of passes that clung to rugged gorges, the ramparts had collapsed, scattered, broken off. Of course the Great Wall had never been a single unbroken curtain of stone across ten thousand li. It had always been closer to a chain of fortresses raised across that vast distance.
Cai Yong knew that. But the forts he walked through, the beacon towers, the relay stations and outposts — all abandoned, crumbling, rotting where they stood — that was a shock.
They could not lean on the forts, so they had no choice but to scrape together troops after the fact and strike back too late.
Cai Yong squeezed his eyes shut. He thought of the landscape of his home, Yan Province.
I always... worried over the way Sili bleeds the other provinces dry.
But set beside the Bing Province he had seen today, Yan Province was a golden age of plenty in every particular.
This cannot stand.
Why were the people of Bing Province — Han and Xiongnu alike — all so poor? Because of Xianbei raids? That was one reason, surely. But if the very system meant to hold those raids at bay was rotten from the root, the cause lay somewhere else.
Sili. At its heart, the office of the Governor of Henan. And within that, Luoyang County — the palaces inside the walls of Luoyang itself.
All the power and wealth of the Han had poured into that one place. For the two hundred years since Emperor Guangwu made Luoyang his capital, the men who held power had been satisfied so long as they could keep Sili intact. Satisfied so long as the roads that carried the produce of every region up to Sili were not cut. Satisfied if a rebellion in the provinces was crushed before it ever reached Sili. Satisfied even when frontier cities fell by the handful and the Great Wall came down, so long as none of it came as far as Sili.
If a man reported, "You Province has fallen!" they would answer like this:
"There's still Ji Province, isn't there?"
This structure — Sili devouring Bing Province — has to be set right from the ground up.
"So what was it that got Cai Yong exiled?"
At Lü Bu's question, Sun Jian scratched his head and gave him an answer.
"He asked them to abolish the rule that says you can't take an official post in your in-laws' native region. That's what did it."
"What? Not even his own hometown — his in-laws'?"
I rode alongside Lü Bu, listening closely to Sun Jian's account.
"Your own hometown, fair enough — they don't want you in league with the local gentry, bleeding the common people dry. But banning you from your in-laws' country as well? Isn't that going too far?"
"You can bleed the people just as well in league with your in-laws."
Sun Jian said it, then grinned at Lü Bu.
"That's the reason they put on the surface. Luoyang's real mind is something else."
"The real mind?"
"Since when has Luoyang ever lost sleep over the common folk in the provinces? Luoyang is only afraid of the provinces growing stronger than itself."
"The strength of the provinces."
"People of different provinces bound tight by marriage, until at last they build a power that can stand against Luoyang and Sili. That's what they mean to stop. I got my first post in Xu Province thanks to that very rule. Quit it and came here, though."
"Then Cai Yong's argument..."
"On the face of it, Cai Yong said, 'If the rules are that tight, an official can't go here and can't go there.' But is that how the Luoyang court heard it?"
They would have heard: Please allow the provinces to grow strong.
"I don't know where Cai Yong's true intent lies. But Luoyang could not abide a claim like that — and so Cai Yong was banished to Bing Province."
"But Wentai, you said the reason for his exile was only a pretext."
"I did. Even if Cai Yong's argument looked insolent, the man is nothing more than a man of letters with a famous name. You ignore him and that's the end of it. His Majesty, the late Emperor — neither of them ever hesitated to do just that."
Well. The great purge of the Pure Stream... the Disasters of the Partisan Prohibitions had not happened for nothing.
"Cai Yong made that argument and still stayed in Luoyang for quite some time. Then all of a sudden they send him to Bing Province using the old argument as their excuse? That means the excuse is a fake."
"In your judgment, Wentai, what's the real reason?"
"Well..."
Sun Jian let the words trail off and sank into thought for a moment.
"For a start, Luoyang's intent is to send Cai Yong out in secret, to take the measure of what Bing Province is truly facing."
"About the campaign against Tanshihuai?"
"Most likely. They'll lift his exile, call him back to Luoyang, and hear his 'report.' Then they'll draw up a finer plan."
"You said 'for a start, Luoyang's intent.' Meaning Cai Yong has an intent of his own?"
At Lü Bu's question Sun Jian threw his head back and roared with laughter.
"Fengxian, you don't strike me as a man of deep learning, but you cut sharp when it counts."
"The Xiongnu read the stars and pick out the wolf hiding in the dark. I've picked up a little of that from them."
"Mm. As I said, I don't know Cai Yong's mind either. But I can think in terms of 'if I were Cai Yong.'"
"All right. If it were you, what would you have come to Bing Province for?"
"After Emperor Gao took the throne — two hundred years in Chang'an. After Emperor Guangwu — two hundred years in Luoyang. And those people, mind you. The imperial house. The ones called the Liu clan."
Lü Bu went taut; I could feel it. Out here, on a road that was the frontier of the frontier, we were about to hear what Sun Jian truly thought — words you would never hear anywhere else. No: words that, no matter who spoke them, you would have to clap your hands over your ears and run from.
"Those people were never from Chang'an or Luoyang to begin with."
"Emperor Gao was a man of Feng County in Pei."
"That was the land of Chu. So whether it was the Hegemon-King of Western Chu or Emperor Gao, it was Chu men fighting Chu men, and the winner took the realm."
Hearing it put that way, it was true. After the fall of Qin, the war between Han and Western Chu had been, in the end, a war among the people of Chu.
"And Emperor Gao cut down every vassal king who was not of his surname, and even made a law that only a Liu could be a king."
"Now think on this, Fengxian," Sun Jian said, and he dropped the reins and spread both arms wide.
I could only stare at Sun Jian with my mouth open. So could Lü Bu.
I heard Lü Bu swallow.
"Then what you want... is for the Suns to take the Lius' place?"
"Well, I wouldn't mind. But better still a realm that no single surname locks in its fist, don't you think? My home, Yang Province, for the Suns. Your home, Bing Province, for the Lüs. How about it?"
Lü Bu squeezed his eyes shut as if the world had started to spin.
"And you think Cai Yong is turning over the same thought?"
"We'll know soon enough."
At the edge of our sight, the walls of Guyuan County — the seat of Wuyuan Commandery — were coming into view.
Sun Jian looked at Lü Bu, who still sat stunned speechless.
How will Lü Bu take what I just said? Is he a man I can ride with — or a man who will stop here, in Bing Province, and go no farther? And as for...
Sun Jian's gaze shifted to the Xiongnu child held in the crook of an arm. The boy called Luanti Bao was strangely dressed today, in the full attire of a Hu shaman. Sun Jian knew nothing of the spirit-craft the Xiongnu believed in, but he recognized it at once. Clothes that belong to the gods are supposed to look alien to the things of this world — you feel it just by looking.
That child's great-grandfather and his granduncle have already reached out to me.
Tute Ruoshi Gongzhu Chanyu, and Left Wise King Hozheng.
They didn't come out and say, leave Zhang Min and take our hand. But it isn't something I can cut off with a single stroke, either.
If he could win the support of Xiongnu cavalry — no, if he could make that cavalry his own — how far would that carry his ambition?
Bao, son of Yufuluo. Is that child bound to the Chanyu as well? Then has the Chanyu reached out to Lü Bu too? Or the Right Wise King who stands behind the Right Guli King would be competing with the Left Wise King, so...
Complicated calculations moved through Sun Jian's mind. Ties to the Luoyang court mattered, but he could not depend on those alone. He had to be ready for the day that link was cut, ready to hold his ground out here on the frontier. In that respect, the Xiongnu and Lü Bu were his vital frontier connections.
The chaos of the Han will not end with one war, or two.
He himself had put down a rebellion in Yang Province and come north to Bing. The same kind of rising could break out in Jing Province, in Yizhou, in Liang Province or You. And the Xianbei invasions would not stop.
In the meantime I will pile merit on merit, and climb higher than Zhang Min. For that day I need a force of my own. A foundation of my own.
Sun Jian pictured the face he had never seen — his son Ce, born two years ago in far southern Wu Commandery, his own home.
Xiongnu or Han, we all move with our children's generation in mind.
For the Sun family legacy he would leave to Ce. To do that, he had to use this war well. And he had to throw another line across to Luoyang.
Cai Yong was bound up with both of those things. Toward Guyuan County, where that man was staying, Sun Jian spurred his horse.