The Path of the Heavenly Demon
"You're older than I am, but I became a disciple first—so you'll address me as your senior martial brother."
"Yes, senior brother."
Ten-year-old Zhang Liao answered without the slightest hesitation. To put a man to work as a proper military officer, he'd need to be fifteen or sixteen at least, which meant five or six more years of martial training under Lü Bu. By then I would be eleven or twelve myself... a stretch, perhaps, but I might just be ready to step forward as a warlord. The timing would land right around the Yellow Turban Rebellion, too.
And so Zhang Liao came to trail after me, Lü Bu, and Du Ying. He was as diligent and earnest as he had been in history—no doubt thanks to the thorough talking-to his father had given him before placing the boy in my care.
By taking Zhang Liao as Lü Bu's new disciple, we had effectively taken a hostage from the old Nie clan. But a hostage, looked at another way, was also a guarantee. It meant: so long as we hold this hostage, the safety of the Nie clan is assured. It would also keep the Nie from doing anything foolish in some attempt to slip out from under Xiongnu influence.
At the same time, I would proclaim throughout the Southern Xiongnu that the prince and a scion of the Nie house were now martial brothers—and that the clan was therefore forgiven and under my protection.
Ah, and Zhang Liao's father said he would keep using the Zhang surname. He wouldn't have minded going back to Nie, but he didn't particularly want to advertise it. So I call the boy Zhang Liao, or simply Liao. If he ever wants to reclaim his ancestors' original name, I intend to call him Nie Liao.
The person who immediately poured out his dissatisfaction with this decision was not Southern Xiongnu society...
"You're taking on a new disciple without even asking me?"
It was my master, Lü Bu.
"Don't you trust your gifted little shaman—your beloved first disciple?"
"It's not that I don't trust you. But you could've at least asked your master. Having one disciple decide to take on another—doesn't look quite right."
"I'm sorry. I just had to have him—I mean, the situation was urgent. I had no choice."
"...Well, I suppose if you wanted to wash away four hundred years of blood feud in a single stroke, you had to go that far."
He grumbled, but Lü Bu understood my reasoning soon enough. If I had merely said the word forgiven and left it at that, there would surely have been men who refused to accept it. The prince may have forgiven them... but will my blade? Someone would have swung a sword at Zhang Liao's family, and if anyone died, I would lose Zhang Liao forever. The boy himself was only ten. He could have been the one to die. That, above all, I had to prevent.
So I invested extravagantly in the symbolism, branding him a distinguished guest of Luanti Bao. I took Zhang Liao in as a hero who had saved countless lives from Tanshihuai, and as Lü Bu's disciple. I bound him in martial brotherhood to Luanti Bao—Grand Shaman, and likewise a disciple of Lü Bu. With that threefold safety net in place, no one would dare lay a hand on the Nie clan unless the Grand Chanyu himself gave the order. Anyone who so much as tried would answer to Lü Bu and to me.
I grinned up at my master.
"And you said it yourself, Master."
"Said what?"
"That what I'm doing looks like building a Bing Province where Xiongnu and Han can live together."
"...Hah."
Lü Bu let out a short, incredulous laugh.
"I taught you martial arts. I never taught you how to wag that tongue."
"But you did teach me the ideal of a world where Xiongnu and Han stand together."
"And forgiving the Nie clan is the start of that?"
"It's a goal we could never reach just by living mixed in among the Xiongnu tribes, don't you think?"
The royal Luanti clan had stepped forward and ended the ancient feud between sovereign and subject—between the Grand Chanyu and Nie Yi. In the smaller sense, I had gained Zhang Liao. In the larger sense, I had laid a foundation on which the faith of Tengri could grow into a true religion. If even Nie Yi could be forgiven, how far did Tengri's embrace extend? That thought would spread whether I willed it or not. And that thought would become power. The power of Tengriism: come, seek forgiveness, submit in earnest, and your old grudges will not be held against you. The power to draw more people in. The power that would, before long, become my army.
Of course, there would be a side effect: opportunists would come flocking. Creatures that barely qualified as human would bow their heads with frantic enthusiasm and beg for forgiveness. That was simply the nature of such creatures. But even if I eventually had to face the difficult task of containing Tengriism's excesses, the element of forgiveness under Tengri had unmistakable advantages. Flexibility of faith. Room to expand.
My great-grandfather, Tute Ruoshi Gongzhu Chanyu, is drawing his last breaths even now, in this year of 178. If the Grand Chanyu's death is a kind of fixed current in history... then isn't Tanshihuai's death the same? Tanshihuai dies three years from now, in 181. That is the year Zhuge Liang and Liu Xie, the future Emperor Xian, will be born... none of which matters to me at the moment.
As is always the case with nomadic empires that have yet to build a proper state, the death of the supreme leader plunges the tribes into chaos. After Tanshihuai dies, his son Helian will spend a considerable time simply holding things together, and once Helian himself is gone, the Xianbei will collapse into total fragmentation. That is the gap I intend to strike. The chaotic years of Xianbei division after the deaths of Tanshihuai and Helian, before Kebineng consolidates his position. That, I suspect, will be the Southern Xiongnu's last chance to reclaim the steppe.
In the original history, the Southern Xiongnu of that era were themselves torn apart by civil war and let the opportunity slip. With me here, that will not happen. We will recover the grasslands, join forces with the faint remnants of the Northern Xiongnu still lingering west of Xianbei territory, and pursue the unification of north and south. To do that, I first have to reform the very constitution of the Southern Xiongnu through the power of Tengriism. Forgiving Zhang Liao and the Nie clan will be the first step. And from there, the path will lead, in time, to forgiving the Xianbei as well.
In the days when the Xianbei had only just descended from Mount Xianbei, they had served as mercenaries of the Han and threatened the Northern Xiongnu from the east. In time they captured Youliu, Chanyu of the Northern Xiongnu, flayed him, and took his hide as a trophy—and they slaughtered a hundred thousand Northern Xiongnu besides. From the Southern Xiongnu's point of view, Youliu was nothing but a pretender, so perhaps the outrage need not run quite that deep. Even so, flaying a man who had been a leader of the Xiongnu people, mocking him, and killing a hundred thousand was more than enough to breed a lasting grudge. Even after the split between north and south, many Northern Xiongnu had fled south as refugees, and a great number of them still carried that hatred—a hundred years later, no less.
On the other hand, killing every last Xianbei or driving them from the steppe was a fantasy. Far better to add their strength to ours and stand against the colossus of the Han. To take a people whose language and customs were so different into the Xiongnu fold... we would need a shared faith. In other words, we would have to bind them and ourselves into a single community of belief. And for that, I needed a Tengri faith that was more systematically organized.
My plans did not stop there. To contend with the various powers of the Han, I would need superior cavalry—and superior cavalry demanded superior breeds of horse. I might well have to conquer the Western Regions before I ever turned on the Han itself. Beyond that, to supply the matériel of war and the wealth that would keep people content, I would need to seize the trade routes: the Silk Road. The wars between Han and Xiongnu had, in the end, been fought over who would dominate the Western Regions. The Xiongnu had grown weak precisely because they lost those lands. The Western Regions had to be conquered. The problem was that the people of the Western Regions were no fools.
Those states were a league of city-kingdoms built on desert oases, and they were naturally weak. Being weak, they submitted to whichever power loomed largest before their eyes. Every time the balance tipped toward the Han or toward the Xiongnu, they switched sides. When Han and Xiongnu stood as equals, they kept their independence—and that was exactly the situation now. So how was I to hold dominion over the Western Regions more firmly? Here, too, I would have to borrow the power of religion.
Because the Western Regions were a vital trade corridor, they were a crossroads of faiths. Buddhism, setting out from India to the south, had rounded the Pamirs and passed through these lands. Zoroastrianism had come from Persia to the west. Nestorianism, branded heretical by Roman Christianity and driven east, would pass through here as well. A Tengri faith that remained at the level of uncodified myth and household shamanism would never win the hearts of the Western Regions.
Tengriism was flexible, of course, and stubbornly alive—so much so that even under the later oppression of Islam it would breathe its own customs into the Islam of the steppe. But I was aiming higher than that. As groundwork for eventually integrating even the peoples of the Western Regions, I had already borrowed Zoroastrianism's struggle between light and darkness. Which, if I thought about it, made me something like the Xiongnu's own Mani. Mani had borrowed heavily from Zoroastrian, Christian, and Buddhist doctrine as well... wait.
The religion Mani founded—Manichaeism—was known in the Central Plains as the Religion of Light. Did that make me the Lord of Light? And the nation I would found after conquering northern China... Ming, the dynasty of brightness? I couldn't help a flicker of unease that my faith might end up branded a demonic cult in the Central Plains, and that I myself would be called the Heavenly Demon. Then again, Buddhism had not yet spread widely through the Central Plains, so the very character for "demon" did not exist. I could probably rest easy on that score. That character would be newly coined during the Northern and Southern Dynasties, specifically to name the Buddha's adversary.
In any case. To unite the various powers beyond the Central Plains and gather strength, I needed a hybrid culture comparable to Alexander's Hellenism. And there was something else I had in mind: the harshness of Han law. There is a story that Gaozu, Liu Bang, having destroyed the Qin, abolished all of Qin's intricate and severe statutes. According to that tale, he replaced them with just three simple laws—the so-called Three Articles—and so the Han acquired a reputation for being more lenient than the Qin. The reality was rather different. Later generations would say that "Han inherited Qin's institutions," and the two states had a great deal in common.
This is only my own reading, but when Liu Bei pressed the Book of Lord Shang—the work of the Legalist Shang Yang—upon his son Liu Shan, and when Zhuge Liang chose the Book of Lord Shang and the Han Feizi as Liu Shan's textbooks, doesn't that suggest that among Wei, Shu, and Wu, the one closest to Legalism was actually Shu? The death of Ma Su and the fall of Li Yan feel less like Zhuge Liang's personal severity than something simply... Qin-like. In short: in a Han world this harsh, a relatively merciful religion might slip into a great many hearts. Just as "love thy neighbor as thyself" had once worked its way into the cracks of Rome's brutal provincial rule.
The region around Shuofang Commandery was the domain of my grandfather Qiangqu, Wise King of the Right, so I had begun my work there first—and the results had exceeded every expectation. Lü Bu, Du Ying, Zhang Liao, and I decided to return to the area around Lishi County in Xihe Commandery.
How long had it been since we left Shuofang and entered Xihe? All the way to Shuofang and back, Lü Bu had periodically sent messengers to let his subordinates know where he was. He had even told them the route he would take going out and coming home. So it was no great feat for his men to guess their commander's location and bring him news. The real question was what kind of news they were bringing.
"General!"
The subordinate who had come to deliver important tidings to Lü Bu in person was none other than Wei Xu. He rode up before Lü Bu, offered his salute, and then flicked a glance in my direction.
Ah. Great-grandfather... I had hoped you would hold on a little longer.
"...The Xiongnu Chanyu has departed this world. And..."
"And?"
When Lü Bu pressed him, Wei Xu licked his lips and answered.
"The new Colonel Protector of the Xiongnu has summoned the cavalry. Hou Cheng and Song Xian—and you as well, General."
My eyes met Lü Bu's.
"Bao."
"The time has come."