The Pure Cao Cao
After sending the Xiongnu prince Luanti Bao on his way, Cao Cao sank into thought. In truth, he had already known of Zhang Xiu's collusion.
Someone was leaking operational plans to Tanshihuai — so Emperor Ling had said, and Cao Cao had taken him at his word, scrutinizing every soul who passed in and out of Luoyang. It was work he had done well in his days as Commandant of the Northern District. All he needed was to widen that same watch across every gate in the city walls.
Sure enough, a handful of travelers caught his eye: people whose journeys lasted far too long to be a simple trip through Hebei. When he winnowed the genuinely suspicious from the merely odd, the root of it all was Zhang Xiu, the former Zhonglangjiang Protecting the Xiongnu.
The men Zhang Xiu sent out of Luoyang vanished in two directions — some toward somewhere in western Bingzhou, others following the Yellow River… and disappearing in the country between Yanmen Commandery in Bingzhou and Dai Commandery in Youzhou. Then, after a long silence, they would turn up in Luoyang again.
Cao Cao let them believe they had fooled him. Their vigilance slackened, and a richer harvest of intelligence poured into his hands.
Zhang Xiu has called upon Regular Palace Attendant Wang Fu in Luoyang. He was granted the extraordinary privilege of entering ahead of all other guests.
Zhang Xiu has met Tian Yan in secret. The names Huo Qubing and Huo Guang were spoken.
Cao Cao assembled the reports and laid them before Emperor Ling, together with a renewed plea that the expedition be called off.
The Emperor's answer was not what he had hoped for.
"The expedition goes ahead as planned. Whatever Zhang Xiu's up to, leave him be."
Cao Cao had no choice but to close his mouth. That was the knack of surviving an emperor, handed down in his family since his grandfather Cao Teng's time.
Tens of thousands of commoners might die, and the Emperor meant to take even that sacrifice and turn it into another instrument for tightening his own grip on power.
Cao Cao was withdrawing with an as you command when Emperor Ling spoke again.
"Brother Aman. What do you figure the foundation of a nation really is?"
He wanted to answer as the sages would have: the people. The common folk. Instead he waited, and let Emperor Ling answer himself.
"The people, you think? Hardly. How are commoners — silt from the Yellow River, the lot of them — supposed to make a country? Heap them up and you've got a dirt pile. The wind blows and they're gone. Dirt doesn't pile itself into a fortress. Same logic: you don't build a nation out of commoners."
Then what? Emperor Ling turned as he asked it.
"The great clans, maybe? The celebrated scholars? Oh, they can gather people well enough in this province or that commandery. Still just a pack of bandits. At best they get swallowed by some greater state — one loud commotion and nothing more. Same principle as packing dirt until it's hard as stone. That still doesn't make a fortress."
Emperor Ling tapped both hands against his own chest.
He drew a long breath. When he spoke again his voice had cooled.
"The only reason they still play at being human — clutching their morality, their precious face, all of it under the name of Han — is that I am a Liu, the Liu is Emperor, and that Emperor rules the Han. There is nothing else. So, Brother Aman: stop feeling guilty about the soldiers who are going to die, and keep watch the way I told you to."
Cao Cao shook his head hard, trying to fling from his mind the two eyes that had pinned him there.
The Emperor had known, and had chosen to let it happen. The result was that Han's expeditionary army against Tanshihuai had been defeated.
Cao Cao went before Emperor Ling once more and asked his question.
"Shall I arrest Duan Jiong and remand Wang Fu for transport? Zhang Xiu can be executed at once."
"No."
Once again the answer was not the one Cao Cao had expected.
"Zhang Min. Tian Yan. Ha Yu. Bring me those three."
"But Your Majesty — I will not claim the three men are without fault. Yet those who have committed far graver crimes…"
Emperor Ling glanced at him and gave a short, dry laugh.
"I'm not going to kill the three of them. I need money to raise a new army. If they want out of prison, they'll have to pay for the privilege. One fine to walk free and be reduced to commoners. Another to take office again. Two payments and the treasury fills up a little. That's the idea."
"Your Majesty — Duan Jiong, Wang Fu, Zhang Xiu…"
The instant he was no longer Brother Aman but Cao Cao, he had no choice but to drop to his knees and receive the command.
Even now, as he hauled the prisoner carts out of Luoyang, the bitterness still sat on the root of his tongue.
Emperor Ling enforced the law, of course — enforced it with a cruelty that was almost pure. But whom it would be strict with, and when, had nothing to do with any principle of law. That was purely a matter of Liu Hong's whim.
The severity of law I meant to raise when I beat Jian Shuo's uncle to death as Commandant of the Northern District — that was not this.
How good it would have been if he could have poured the whole of what sat in his chest out to that Xiongnu prince, the child called Luanti Bao. But what kind of man Emperor Ling truly was… that, he could not bring himself to say.
It choked him. To lay the sores of the Great Han bare before a Xiongnu was a humiliation. No — after speaking with the Xiongnu prince Luanti Bao, humiliation was no longer the point.
The moment a prodigy of that caliber learned the rot inside the Han, what brazen ambition would he take into his heart?
Cao Cao turned over the histories he had read until the corners of the bamboo and wooden slips were worn smooth. Western Zhou, ruined by the Rong invasions, forced to move its capital to Luoyang. The Founding Emperor, encircled by Modu on Baideng Mountain, compelled to a surrender that still stained the record.
What guarantee was there that the Xiongnu child, once grown, would not make the Central Plains live through those humiliations all over again?
He has already come to this Cao Cao and asked for help — help to bring the Xiongnu under a single hand!
If the Xiongnu were no longer split, if they answered to one man's will alone, then even the Southern Xiongnu — already reduced by successive collapses to less than half a people — would be dangerous.
And yet.
In the brief season when he had served as magistrate of Dongqu County in Dong Commandery, Yan Province, Cao Cao had watched commoners searching for the Way. A Way that dreamed of a world at peace… Taiping. That was why they called it the Taiping Dao, wasn't it?
If this creature who calls himself Emperor only swings the law like a tool to shore up his own power, then the law has lost the Way.
He remembered those days in Dongqu, when his heart had drifted from Confucianism and from Legalism alike and begun to lean toward the Daoists.
And then, unbidden, the thought arrived.
If the Emperor's law lost the Way so completely that he himself would one day have to take not the law of Han but the Way as his measure. If Liu Hong's tyranny became something that could no longer be left alone — something that had to be checked. Or if it was already too late, and the man was running so wild that he could not be checked at all. If the realm stood at the fork between ruin and survival.
"Will there come a day I need the Xiongnu's military strength?"
He flinched at the words he had spoken aloud, alone. The surprise lasted only a moment.
"Even if I cannot command them — could I not at least make them this Cao Cao's friends?"
A steadfast friend in Bingzhou, beyond Sili… something other than his grandfather's prestige, other than his father's fortune. Something else entirely…
"My father is being carried away in a prisoner cart. As his son, I cannot walk free beside him. Might I be permitted to ride in the cart as well?"
When Zhang Hong, son of Zhang Min, made that request, Cao Cao nodded.
The Han affixed the word filial to every emperor's posthumous name. Emperor Wen, Emperor Jing, Emperor Wu — properly spoken, they were the Filial Emperor Wen, the Filial Emperor Jing, the Filial Emperor Wu. The very system for recommending men of talent was called Xiaolian: Filial and Incorrupt. A man was chosen according to how splendidly he practiced filial piety in his own district.
Whether the boy Zhang Hong truly loved his father that deeply, or whether he was performing piety with one eye on the world's opinion, Cao Cao could not tell. But standing on principle in front of a man who meant to enact filial devotion would do Cao Cao no good either. So he allowed it.
Watching Zhang Hong climb willingly into the prisoner cart, Cao Cao thought of someone else.
Brother Benchu…
The man who had observed the three-year mourning for his aunt — his "adoptive mother," if one insisted — and then withdrawn from the world declaring he would observe another three years for his uncle, his "adoptive father." Yuan Shao. Six years of mourning, all told.
How exacting that great theater of piety really was: during the three-year mourning, even sitting somewhere comfortable for a moment, even nursing a sick body, was enough for the Qingliu types to chew a man to pieces as "unfilial." In truth they were only watching with bright eyes for a chance to tear down a rival in the piety contest — bite and rend, nothing more.
Is this the fifth year… or is it about to end?
Not a single handle given to anyone in all that time. He was a formidable man, no question. And it was not as though the Yuan clan's power had simply shut people's mouths if a problem arose. There was a man who would have leapt for joy at the faintest speck of dirt on Yuan Shao.
Gonglu.
Yuan Shu's face rose in his mind, and Cao Cao gave a bitter smile. One should not merely admire Yuan Shao's flawless conduct, nor merely scold Yuan Shu's jealousy of the cousin the ancestral rites had named his elder.
If the Emperor uses the law as a tool, how can the people beneath him not use filial piety as a tool?
The first men who raised filial piety to the highest value in the Han may have dreamed of a realm that would grow, little by little, more ethical. But the moment piety was compelled by institution, its corruption began.
A man who wished to be called a filial son thought of nothing but how loudly, how theatrically, he could perform his devotion. A man who wished to crush that filial son and make the name his own thought of nothing but hunting, eyes bloodshot, for some defect in the other's piety.
Take, for example, the duty of avenging a parent. Simply finding the enemy and killing him did not even count as filial. You had to slaughter the distant cousins who had never so much as met the man, the neighborhood acquaintances with whom he had only exchanged greetings — you had to see that much blood before the renowned Qingliu scholars would nod and allow that piety had been done.
What a suffocating thing this filial piety had become!
Everyone had become a slave to piety. Worms wearing the name of filial sons.
The day will come when "filial son" is nothing but another name for the vilest scoundrel!
The closer they drew to Luoyang, the stronger the thought grew. Very well: let the Emperor call himself the foundation of the nation. Then what was to be done when the foundation itself had gone wrong?
This could not be left as it was. Something had to be done. Even if the work was dangerous… the rampage of Luoyang, of the Emperor, could not be allowed to run on unchecked.
And so the moment Cao Cao had handed Zhang Min, Ha Yu, and Tian Yan over to the prison in Luoyang, he went to the villa outside the city walls where his father Cao Song was staying.
"Father, I need to borrow some money."
Zhang Xiu had returned. He had been restored as Zhonglangjiang Protecting the Xiongnu.
Had Cao Cao failed to persuade the Emperor, just as Cai Yong had?
I had no luxury of bristling at Zhang Xiu the way a cat bristles down to the last hair. My great-grandfather, Tute Ruoshi Gongzhu Chanyu, had taken to his sickbed.
Perhaps the defeat in the campaign against Tanshihuai was not the wound that mattered. Perhaps the expedition itself had been what broke the old Chanyu's body.
The entire Southern Xiongnu was watching the Grand Chanyu die.
The six Gudu Marquesses, the lord of the Xubu among them, had already gathered in Lishi County, Xihe Commandery. And of them all, Xubu Chang — flushed with arrogance now that Zhang Xiu was back — sneered in my direction.
"O son of the Right Guli King, so lauded as Grand Shaman — is this truly as far as the lifespan Tengri granted our Grand Chanyu will reach?"
"Xubu Gudu Marquess!"
My granduncle Hozheng snapped the warning, and nothing more. He did not rebuke him further. There was a graver matter bearing down on us than Xubu Chang's mockery of me: the question of who would be the next Grand Chanyu.
Like a kurultai of the Mongol Empire in ages yet to come, the six Gudu Marquesses and the Four Horns and the Six Horns had gathered here in Lishi County to speak of the succession.
Left Wise King Hozheng. Right Wise King Qiangqu. Xubu Chang, the Xubu Gudu Marquess, whose support from Zhang Xiu was all but certain. And the remaining five Gudu Marquesses, each working furiously through the question of how to move among those three.
I sat inside the Grand Chanyu's imperial yurt with every gaze upon me, and quietly closed my eyes.
I had done everything I could. And yet… was there something I had missed? Something left undone?
That was when my father, Yufuluo, came quietly to my side and whispered.
"Bao."
"…Yes."
"There's someone who wants to see you, just for a moment."
I glanced at my father to hold my place and stepped out of the yurt. The warriors under his command were detaining a man who was, by any measure, a Han — waiting for me.
"And you are?"
"I was sent by Gentleman Consultant Cao."
I unfolded the silk he held out as quickly as my hands would let me.
Burn this once you have finished reading.
— Cao Cao
A letter from Cao Cao, beginning with that single instruction.
It's done.
I forced down the smile that tried to lift the corner of my mouth.