The Grand Shaman
"I'll be honest. I was testing you."
That was what I heard on the ride back with my master, Lü Bu.
"I had to wonder whether every word out of your mouth was something the Right Luli King had coached you to say."
I decided to hold the line. I was the child who heard Tengri's voice. That was the story, and I was keeping it.
"Can't be helped. You're not a believer in Tengri, Master."
"It's uncanny, though. A five-year-old carrying thoughts like that."
Lü Bu seemed to be turning over the conversation I had held with Cai Yong. Could a ruler who worshipped the Confucian school ever live in harmony with a people whose traditions had nothing to do with it? When one side called it civilization and the other called it sacrilege—how were they supposed to share a world? That, I supposed, was what he was chewing on.
"They weren't my thoughts. They were Tengri's words."
"Even if that god really does whisper in your ear, the cleverness it takes to pass it along isn't five years old."
I let out the most five-year-old giggle I could manufacture.
"I didn't even know you were thinking about things like that, Master."
"Like what?"
"Calling Duan Jiong a man who does business by war. Saying a warrior's courage is admitting you can't win a war you can't win..."
Duan Jiong had taken his share of abuse for siding with the eunuchs, but there was no denying he was a veteran who had won great merit pacifying the Qiang. Plenty of warriors still looked up to a man like that. Lü Bu had spoken anyway, knowing the words would travel and turn his road to advancement into a bed of thorns.
In a way, perhaps this was the purity of Lü Bu in his twenties.
Then what, exactly, did a man have to live through to become the Lü Bu everyone knew from Romance of the Three Kingdoms—the one past thirty? The Lü Bu who betrayed Ding Yuan and then Dong Zhuo, one after the other.
As I had said before, Red Hare was a breed the Southern Xiongnu themselves had improved. The famous scene of Dong Zhuo tempting Lü Bu with the Red Hare steed was never going to happen. So how would Dong Zhuo seduce him, then? And how would Lü Bu become the kind of man who could be seduced?
...It has to be something that happens in his twenties.
If there was a great event waiting for Lü Bu in this decade of his life, I could think of nothing but the campaign against Tanshihuai that was almost upon us. A defeat that twisted his character, maybe.
Hmph.
Which meant that what I had to protect in this war was not only the Southern Xiongnu's strength. I had to protect Lü Bu's spirit as well.
Ah. And there was Sun Jian, too.
Sun Jian rode alongside Lü Bu, his face a blank. What was he thinking? Sensing my gaze, he turned only his eyes toward me.
"Son of the Right Luli King."
"Yes?"
"If what you heard from this Tengri or whatever god is true—doesn't that mean we already stopped the war, just by meeting Lord Cai?"
Ah. That.
My face went stiff before I could stop it. The history I was trying to change at this stage was limited to preserving Southern Xiongnu strength and bringing Lü Bu over to our side. Stopping the war itself was beyond me. In the original history, Emperor Ling, Liu Hong, had ignored Cai Yong's counsel and forced the campaign against Tanshihuai through anyway.
"It's going to happen."
Lü Bu sighed.
"So even if Lord Cai has seen Bing Province with his own eyes—even if he throws his weight around in Luoyang—it's no use?"
"If it can't be stopped, then we prepare. All we can do is hope Lord Cai puts his influence to that kind of work."
In that instant, I did not miss the expression that flickered across Sun Jian's face, gone almost before it was there.
Relief...?
As if he were reassured that the war would break out on schedule—that he would still have his chance to seize it. Then it was gone. As if it had never been there at all.
A chill crawled over my skin.
A man who had already won merit hunting bandits in his teens. A man who would march north during the campaign against Dong Zhuo and kill the Inspector of Jing Province along the way. A man who never hesitated to stain his hands with blood. That was Sun Jian.
And maybe—maybe Sun Jian was one of those men Lü Bu had meant when he spoke of people who did business by war.
I would have to warn Lü Bu. And I needed to think very carefully about whether to pull Sun Jian onto my side.
In Bing Province society, Lü Bu's denunciation of Duan Jiong spread like a grass fire, and the opinions of the Han notables split cleanly in two.
Of course, this clash of opinions was a Han notables' affair. Among the Xiongnu it was hardly considered important. I did not have the luxury of caring about it either.
I trained as Lü Bu ordered. I followed my father and helped with the work of the herds. I went to my great-grandfather's Chanyu court and learned the duties of a shaman. The days filled themselves.
At the festivals I played the instruments I had been taught, and I danced, and I sang the songs that praised Tengri and the goddesses—songs of those gods changing their shapes into swan and deer, into wolf and hawk, to aid Modu and the great Chanyus in their mighty deeds. Songs of the age of glory.
But sure proof that the age had faded came tacked onto the tail of every festival. A sacrifice for the Emperor, staged for the Han overseers watching us. Songs alien to the Xiongnu tradition we had just performed—dry, lifeless hymns praising the sanctity of the Son of Heaven and praying for his health and long life. The festivals always ended by tasting that bitter humiliation once more.
Perhaps it was the rebound from that humiliation. The conversation I had held with Cai Yong began to spread through Xiongnu society. Most likely the story attached to Lü Bu and Cai Yong's exchange had simply taken longer to reach our side.
"The Right Luli King's son debated a great scholar of the Han—and won!"
That was a little too much embroidery, wasn't it?
"With a heart strong in Tengri, he shut that Han bastard up—the one who dared try to trample our traditions!"
"The faith of our people in Tengri is older than the oldest of your histories! Hah... how does a child that young say a thing like that?"
"Five years old. I still can't believe it."
"Believe it! He has truly received Tengri's grace—that's why he can show such a face at five!"
"They say the Old Shamaness named him her successor before she died?"
"He thundered at them! Force us to bow to Confucius and Mencius, and we will only raise our banners and draw our bows taut!"
"He'll be the Grand Shaman of the Xiongnu!"
Because it was grounded in fact, there was no ceiling on how far the exaggeration could run. Even walking past people I was hit with looks so full of expectation that it was enormously uncomfortable. And my great-grandfather seemed intent on fanning those rumors still hotter, to shore up a legitimacy he did not have enough of.
Of course, where there are looks of expectation, there are looks of wariness and jealousy as well. There were several of those. One of them belonged to Xubu Chang, the man who had lost face to me the last time we crossed paths.
Xubu Chang did not seem pleased that the authority of my great-grandfather, Tute Ruoshi Gongzhu Chanyu, kept rising. Only if that authority collapsed could he—could the Xubu clan—take the Chanyu's seat for themselves.
Using Tengri's voice as my excuse, I advised Tute Ruoshi Gongzhu Chanyu to keep a close watch on Xubu Chang.
"The way he went out of his way to contradict me last time, and the way he shielded Zhang Xiu, the former Colonel Protector of the Xiongnu—neither sat well with me. It might be worth looking into him."
The Xubu were a power to match the Chanyu himself. We could not search their royal encampment from top to bottom. But the effort was not fruitless, either.
"Just as you said, Zhang Xiu appears to have taken part in the discussions in Luoyang—the ones the eunuch Wang Fu is driving, about a campaign against Tanshihuai. And before Zhang Xiu left Bing Province, he did visit Xubu Chang's tent. Beyond that, it is hard to know..."
I had only poked on a hunch. And it was actually true?
No wonder he had thrashed around like that last time. Men with something filthy behind them tend to commit the kind of dirty work you would more or less expect, as if there were a set pattern to guilt. Even so—to think he would try to seize power by riding the defeat of both the Han and the Xiongnu.
The best outcome was still Cai Yong persuading the Emperor, so that the war never happened at all.
But things did not go as I wished. And they did not go as I expected, either.
The war was not started by Luoyang. It was started by Tanhan Mountain. From that place Tanshihuai had planted right on You Province's doorstep, as if laughing in the face of the Han frontier.
A meal across from a grown son ought, as a rule, to come with pride. All the more so for a mother who had raised that son alone, after the boy's father had left the world long ago.
Empress Dowager Dong could not think of it that way. Not even for a moment. The hand that held her utensils trembled so badly she could not eat properly, for fear she might drop them.
Her son, Liu Hong, twenty-one this year, chewed through every dish set before him whether his mother managed a bite or not.
"Mother."
At Liu Hong's voice, Empress Dowager Dong startled as if struck.
"Y-yes. Yes, Your Majesty."
"This table is a genuine pleasure today, isn't it. Do you remember when we lived in Hejian?"
Hejian Kingdom, in Ji Province. When a king was enfeoffed over a commandery, the commandery was called a kingdom; Hejian was one of those. Among the descendants of the king enfeoffed there had been the previous emperor—Emperor Huan, Liu Zhi. The son sitting before Empress Dowager Dong was Liu Zhi's cousin once removed. That he had become emperor at all was nothing but luck.
Imperial clan, yes—but a cadet line of a cadet line of a cadet line, barely clinging to a marquisate in a place called Jieduting. The administrative maps had since shifted, and Jieduting now belonged to Boling Commandery rather than Hejian Kingdom, but Liu Hong still spoke, from habit, of "when we lived in Hejian." Perhaps he preferred to present himself as a descendant of the King of Hejian rather than as the marquis of a mere village. He did have a way of stressing his origins—"our Hejian royal house"—as if that were what sealed him as the rightful heir of his distant cousin, Emperor Huan.
"We were village marquises in name, but so poor a meal like this was something we never even dreamed of. I actually thought about becoming a merchant, you know that? Looking back, I'm very glad I didn't."
"Th-that is so, Your Majesty."
"But here's the thing. Once I became emperor in Luoyang, I found that all these Confucian students and scholars—when it comes to commerce, when it comes to money—they only pretend to keep their hands clean. They never actually try to understand what any of it is. They just say the common people are lazy, that they won't farm, that they want easy profit from trade. Ha! Bastards who've never gone hungry in their lives."
Killing intent soaked through her son's voice in an instant. Empress Dowager Dong's body shook.
"We must not be like that, Mother. We must not forget the low place we came from. Which is why... Mother. You are called Empress Dowager not because you are a woman worthy of being Empress Dowager, and not because my late father was emperor. It is purely because I am emperor."
"Your words are most just, Your Majesty."
"Which means you will not whisper with the Song clan—the Empress's people. And you will not try anything with Consort He, who bore my son. Bian is five this year, isn't he. Ah, and those officials who come running to you to complain about this war—you will not, in front of me, dare to act as if they were your faction. As if you amounted to something."
Before Empress Dowager Dong could find an answer, Liu Hong's hand tapped a corner of the table. She squeezed her eyes shut.
How could she forget the place his hand was pointing to.
Seven years ago. The son who had killed Dou Wu at twelve turned fourteen, and this time he killed his own maternal uncle, cut off the head, and brought it to the dinner table. So that his mother would look upon her brother's severed head.