In Search of Allies
An altar rose on the fields of Lishi County.
A Chanyu's daily duty was to pray to Heaven and Earth, to the sun and the moon — but to heap up an altar and announce one's accession to Heaven, to Tengri, was unmistakably a Han influence.
Ordinarily, once a Chanyu's election was decided, the Four Horns and Six Horns of the Luanti clan would lift him upon their shoulders. They would carry him out of the tent, and the rite would end as he passed between the Great Banner, hung with splendid tassels, and the ranks of cavalry. That spare, unadorned custom had suited the original spirit of the Xiongnu, the ethos of warriors.
But the Chanyus of the Southern Xiongnu — a government in exile — needed authority, and so they had gradually chosen to imitate the gorgeous, elaborate ways of the Han. The altar Hozheng had raised this time was no different.
Hozheng climbed the steps wearing a smile of deep satisfaction. His father Tute Ruoshi Gongzhu Chanyu's death had been a sorrow, of course. But far greater had been the dread that, hemmed in by the other Xiongnu noble houses and by his younger brother's family, he — the Left Wise King — might fail to inherit the throne at all. And so this smile was the smile of a man who could finally set that fear aside.
Of course, this accession had been arranged by that strange child... his grandnephew Bao's scheme. The Huyan clan had not withdrawn gracefully either; they had demanded that their daughter be given the seat of Second Yanzhi.
Now that I am Chanyu, that is a problem I shall overcome in due course.
He would set the Xiubu, the Huyan, and the rest of the houses against one another, and in so doing raise the Chanyu's authority ever higher. Cherishing that grand design, he climbed, step by step.
He reached the summit of the altar and sank to his knees, ready to announce his accession to Tengri — and then he saw a shadow that should not have been there.
"Bao...!"
The Grand Shaman — the grandnephew they had now agreed to call Khagan — stepped into view in splendid dress, something glittering gold in each hand.
I'd gone to a fair amount of trouble hunting down textiles that depicted a Xiongnu Chanyu and his accession rites.
Well... the Xiongnu preferred building tombs to sky burial, so if I'd just excavated a royal tomb in Mobei and come up with something like a Goguryeo mural, the whole business would have been easier. The thought had even crossed my mind that I could simply lift a gold crown out of a cache of burial goods and use that.
But if a prince of the blood started digging up his own dynasty's tombs, even Oppert wouldn't have the face to call himself a grave robber after that.
So I reconstructed a gold crown as best I could from the various Chanyus I had seen in my visions, and from the textiles that still preserved Xiongnu paintings. The so-called Yingzheng Gold Crown — the gold crown of the Grand Chanyu. A gold crown whose summit, above two bands of gold, bore the figure of a hawk wrought in gold and jade.
Using the finest silks and sable pelts I possessed, I even wove a cap into the crown's interior. The result was a truly magnificent Yingzheng Gold Crown. All of it, I suppose, by the grace of Elder Cao Song.
And with that crown in my hands I hid at the summit of the altar, and revealed myself the instant Hozheng knelt before Tengri. I was of the royal blood and Grand Shaman Khagan besides. There was no one who could stop me from lending a hand like this.
The rite was already in full swing, and I appeared with a solemn face and a gold crown in my grip, so Hozheng could only kneel there wearing a look of shock. I stood before him and raised the crown high.
At that, Hozheng could not raise his voice. He hissed at me in a whisper.
"Bao! What do you think you're doing!"
I ignored him and pressed on.
I lowered the raised crown straight onto Hozheng's head. The cap — silk without, warm sable within — settled so that it covered his hair and ears properly. I adjusted the gold bands so they would not sit crooked, so that the hawk of gold and jade would stand true upon the crown of his head, so that the front of the diadem would rest at just the right place on his brow.
All the while Hozheng glared at me fiercely, but he could not shake off my hands. Not here. Not now.
I had no need to wear a crown myself. Not yet. It was enough that I become the one who, in Tengri's name, places the crown. Was it not better that a Chanyu be neither acclaimed by men nor self-proclaimed, but one who had received Heaven's approval?
Yes. I had just invented a coronation.
The day might come when I set a crown upon my own head with my own hands. For now, it meant that Chanyus would have to kneel and wear the crown I placed upon them.
I was Tengri's deputy. I would become the one who carried out the conquest Tengri desired.
Through the year 178 I preempted the title of Khagan and made it the word for the leader of the Tengri faith, and I set a crown upon Hozheng's head and introduced the very concept of a coronation.
Emperor Ling, Liu Hong, having received the head of the Colonel Protector of the Xiongnu, apparently had the man gibbeted in the middle of Luoyang, declaring that he had dared try to kill the Xiongnu Chanyu, who stood immediately beneath the Emperor. The matter had been handled exactly as Emperor Ling wished, and so Cao Cao, it seemed, had succeeded in keeping any blame from falling on us.
And then... a younger brother was born.
Father named him Qubei.
...Huh? Qubei?
As I recalled it, Qubei was the uncle of Yufuluo and Huchuquan. Which would mean he ought to be a son of Tute Ruoshi Gongzhu Chanyu. At least, that was how the records had it.
But among the Xiongnu, and among the Xianbei and Goguryeo as well, the ancient records were oddly full of men who lived very long and fathered children very late. You couldn't help but doubt the genealogies. Were the men called father and son truly father and son? Or had the one claiming to be the son simply dragged some hero into the family tree and made him a father? Were they recorded as father and son when a generation had dropped out between them, so that they were really more like great-grandfather and great-grandson?
Luanti Qubei himself was one of the strange ones, if you followed his career. He was supposedly the uncle of Yufuluo and Huchuquan, yet his recorded exploits fell in roughly the same period as Liu Bao's and Huchuquan's. If it was a stretch to assume that Tute Ruoshi Gongzhu Chanyu, who died in 178, had sired Qubei on his deathbed, there had even been speculation that Qubei was Hozheng's son.
But from what I had seen since possessing the Xiongnu Liu Bao, Hozheng and Qiangqu were brothers — so Qubei could be a cousin to Yufuluo and Huchuquan, but he could never be their uncle.
So what was going on?
The original Liu Bao's memories were uncertain on this point... no. The original Xiongnu Liu Bao understood it. I was the one who didn't. What was this?
The answer came soon enough. When Grandfather, the Right Wise King Qiangqu, paid a brief visit to Yufuluo's camp to congratulate his daughter-in-law on the birth, he said this:
"I should like to raise Qubei as my own youngest son."
Ah.
Even into the modern era, among the Mongols or the Kazakhs — one of those peoples — there had been such a custom. The custom of a grandfather or grandmother raising one of the grandchildren as their own youngest child. The parents' generation was relieved of some of the burden of child-rearing, and the three generations — grandparents, parents, and child — grew all the closer. Or so I had heard.
Of course, to outsiders it looked bizarre. So the parent and child become siblings? Doesn't that tangle the family tree? But for the nomads of Central Eurasia, people scattered far across the wide steppe, it was a tradition that let them share a family's warmth with one another. To Han eyes it must have looked enormously confusing, and so Qubei's generation in the records had come out all wrong.
In other words, a fact the original Xiongnu Liu Bao understood had left me thoroughly bewildered.
...Anyway. Huchuquan was already enough of a headache, and now Qubei had been born on top of it. In later years Qubei would stand with Huchuquan and check me, too...
Hrm.
"Bao!"
Speak of the devil. Huchuquan — my uncle — seemed to have followed his father here.
"You've come, Uncle."
"I've been practicing my archery like crazy! Sword work too! Father says he'll take me hunting now!"
He started bragging the moment he arrived. Had I poured a bit too much fire into him last time? Then again, he was a ten-year-old boy. It was only natural...
Ten years old. Ten?
I thought of Zhang Liao, who had followed behind me, and turned —
"Who are you?"
Huchuquan asked Zhang Liao the same question. Zhang Liao flinched, then bowed in proper courtesy.
"I am Zhang Liao, junior martial brother to the Khagan."
"Ah, so you're the descendant of Nie Yi who got pardoned this time?"
I tensed, half expecting Huchuquan to spit out something rude, but he only looked Zhang Liao up and down and asked:
"You any good with a weapon?"
"I have learned a little staff work under my master, Lord Lü."
"Then let's have a match."
Yes!
Thanks to the dream I had breathed into Huchuquan in Tengri's name — the dream of becoming a great warrior — he had clearly been training in earnest. A boy his own age, and a lively-looking one at that, standing right in front of him: of course he would want to test what his training had earned.
Zhang Liao glanced at me. I nodded.
Binding Huchuquan with the Tengri faith and my words alone might prove difficult. But what if he had a comrade-in-arms, a friend he had grown up with?
Wait. In the original history, these two served in the same Cao Cao army and fought Sun Quan at the Battle of Ruxu, didn't they?
...Zhang Liao and Huchuquan, serving me instead of Cao Cao? That might work out just fine.
I gave them leave to spar, and added:
"You are not to be injured during the bout. If either of you gets hurt, I will tell Tengri, and there will be punishment!"
The year 178 waned, and 179 arrived.
The Han emperor Liu Hong had changed the era name the year before, from Xiping to Guanghe. And so the year 179 was the second year of Guanghe. I turned seven.
I had enthroned Hozheng, held down the Xiubu Gudu Marquess, and disposed of the Colonel Protector, succeeding in preserving several times more of the Southern Xiongnu's strength than in the original history.
So what should I do now?
"Sister Ying."
Du Ying, who had been in the middle of her work, turned at my call with a smile. Poets so often recalled the lovely elder sister who had looked after them in childhood... Du Ying was exactly that, for me. She was seventeen now — just the age to bloom in full radiance, the age to become a happy bride.
"What is it, Bao?"
"Let's go find the man called Changsheng."
I will make her happy.
Watching Du Ying's eyes well, and watching her smile widen on purpose, I made that resolution. Of course, that was not my only motive. If I placed Guan Yu — Changsheng — in my debt, I would be able to join hands with Liu Bei's faction as well. In short: now that I had some breathing room, I needed to start building alliances outside.
I called for the uncle who, ever since last year's bout, had pestered his father — my grandfather — into staying at Big Brother's tent, which was to say Yufuluo's: the uncle who still had not grown up. And for the senior martial brother older than I was.
"Uncle Huchuquan! Liao! We're going to Youzhou!"
"Why do I have to look after a bunch of kids..."
Grumble, grumble, grumble. With Wei Xu's muttering for company, we headed northeast, toward Youzhou.
Lü Bu could not come with us this time. He was busy with one task after another under Wang You, the newly appointed Colonel Protector of the Xiongnu.
This Wang You was not particularly famous himself in the Records of the Three Kingdoms, but the people around him were. For one, Wang You's nephew Wang Chang was a statesman and general of Wei who would distinguish himself in the wars against Wu in the latter half of the Records. A close friend of this Wang Chang was Wang Ling, the man who, like Guanqiu Jian and Zhuge Dan, would raise a rebellion against the Sima clan. And whose nephew was Wang Ling? None other than the nephew of Wang Yun — famous in the Romance for using Lü Bu and Diaochan to kill Dong Zhuo.
As one might guess from the fact that they were all named Wang, every one of them belonged to the illustrious Taiyuan Wang clan. People it would do Lü Bu no harm at all to cultivate.
And so I left Lü Bu in Bingzhou and made up my party with Du Ying, Zhang Liao, and Huchuquan. Lü Bu attached Wei Xu to us as an escort. Which was fine, as far as it went...
...Perhaps I had lived too hard for too many years in a child's body. Or perhaps it was some endemic illness we had picked up while passing through Jizhou on the way to Youzhou.
"Hey, Xiongnu kid!"
"Bao!"
"Senior Brother!"
"Nephew!"
I felt Wei Xu's hand catch me as I nearly toppled from the saddle, and then I lost consciousness.
When I opened my eyes, I was in a room thick with the smell of medicinal decoction. Needles stood in me here and there. The fever... was gone. A clean, exhilarating sensation, as if I had been healed in a single instant.
"Xiongnu kid! You're awake!"
Wei Xu, wearing a face that said this brat had us worried sick; Du Ying, Zhang Liao, and Huchuquan, who had been worrying alongside him... and two men I had never seen before. Men who looked to be somewhere between their mid-thirties and forty.
The physicians who had treated me? Physicians... if they were physicians out of the Three Kingdoms?
I dropped to my knees and pressed my hands together toward the one of the two who held the needles.
"This humble Bao owes his life to your medical arts, honored elder! May I ask the name of my benefactor?"
Hua Tuo! Please be Hua Tuo! If it's Hua Tuo I can make him surgeon to the Xiongnu army...
The physician answered with a kindly smile.