The Disease Is Called Han (3)
They gathered at a thatched cottage in the Kingdom of Changshan, in Ji Province.
Each of them carried a pack of needles or medicinal herbs. They were all between twenty and thirty; not one among them was older than that. And every man held something long and slender, wound tightly in cloth.
Anyone who had spent years handling weapons would have known, at a glance, that a spear or a blade lay wrapped inside. For the moment, though, they were nothing more than physicians traveling with rather a lot of luggage. No one stopped them. No one searched their packs.
They had a justification, besides. The Emperor has commanded the eunuchs, and the eunuchs have commanded the physicians, to go forth and contend with the plagues in every region. That was the warrant they carried. Claiming to be physicians was enough to let them roam the empire as they pleased — and to spread, as they went, the name of the Taiping Dao and of the Great Worthy Teacher.
They filed into the cottage and formed ranks in the courtyard. Those who knew one another's faces exchanged brief greetings. The men did not call each other by their given names. They used nicknames — because they were men who had fled homes they could no longer live in, or men charged with carrying out Zhang Jue's most secret orders, and so they hid what they had been born.
The nicknames had been given by their comrades, each one drawn from some mark of character or habit. Ox Horn. Flying Swallow. White Rabbit. Yellow Dragon. Great Virtue. White Wave. Thunder Lord. White Rider. Names of that sort.
Of course, those who were close knew one another's true names as well. White Rabbit's was Su Gao; White Wave's was Han Xian. Even when the full name remained hidden, a surname or a given name would sometimes slip through. Flying Swallow was a Zhe. Great Virtue was a Guo. The man nicknamed Phoenix was known only to be a Yang. White Rider's clan name was a mystery, but his given name, they said, was Yan.
However they styled themselves, these men had come to Changshan today because Zhang Jue had summoned them.
"The Great Worthy Teacher is coming forth."
It was Ox Horn who spoke — the most tight-lipped of them, true to his name — and at his word they all went to their knees. The movement was too crisp, too perfectly drilled, to belong to any company of physicians.
"Raise your heads, all of you."
The voice was gentle. The men lifted their faces with care.
A man of about forty sat inside the cottage, a man who, at a glance, might have been nothing more than an ordinary farmer. He was not. He was the teacher they revered without reserve. He was Zhang Jue.
"Look at you. Faces that have gone out into every corner of the empire and come back having saved a great many lives."
Pride warmed his voice. Ox Horn answered.
"We have not only saved lives, Teacher. We have carried your teaching with us. Already, in every region, those who follow the Way of Supreme Peace grow more numerous by the day."
Ox Horn glanced at Flying Swallow, who took up the report.
"The work of gathering the displaced and organizing them into Greater Fang and Lesser Fang proceeds smoothly as well. Tempering the heart, hardening the body, teaching each man the strength to defend himself — none of it has given us any trouble."
Zhang Jue nodded.
"A man must save himself before he waits for someone else to save him. Before the violence of the strong, the resistance of the weak is usually swept aside without a trace. But if each of the weak steels himself to stand against the strong, and if at last they bind themselves together, they will have strength enough to save people."
His gaze traveled slowly down the line of his disciples.
"Their lot may not improve. But they will be able to stop the next cruelty, and the one after that. And if the people who have learned to defend themselves gather and make little nations of their own, then someday a world may come in which men are content to eat their daily bread and do not prey upon one another."
White Rider spoke next.
"In Ji Province, where you reside, Teacher, that world is already opening. From You Province in the north to Yan, Yu, Xu, and Yang in the south, the teaching of the Great Worthy Teacher is spreading, slowly but without pause. It will be so. It must."
Zhang Jue looked away toward some distant place and was silent for a time. Then he smiled, faintly.
"I am grateful to hear you say so, White Rider."
Something rustled in his hand.
"A letter from Yuanyi."
Yuanyi. The name of Ma Yuanyi tightened every man in the courtyard.
Zhang Jue's foremost disciple. If Confucius had Zilu, Zhang Jue had Ma Yuanyi. None of them knew Ma Yuanyi's true name, but they knew that the nickname Yuanyi — Foremost Righteousness — had been given by Zhang Jue himself. How much trust did a man have to earn before his teacher named him that?
And as if to answer that trust, Ma Yuanyi had traveled not only as far as Jing Province and Yang Province, but in his teacher's stead had gone in and out of Luoyang itself.
"Bu Si of Yan Province, Bo Cai of Yu Province, Mancheng of Jing Province, and the brothers Guan Sheng and Guan Hai of Qing Province have all done well. In the establishing of the Fang, not one of them has gone astray."
The work of binding the Taiping Dao into a single body across those three regions had all fallen to Ma Yuanyi. And that was not the whole of it. He had a gift for founding organizations with his own hands.
"They say a rumor is making the rounds in the world."
Zhang Jue had charged Ma Yuanyi with the Taiping Dao organization throughout Wei Commandery, and Ma Yuanyi had succeeded.
"If Heaven does not grant me so very long a time, I will leave what comes next to Yuanyi. Serve him as you have served me."
He had named Ma Yuanyi his heir, passing over even his own younger brothers, Zhang Bao and Zhang Liang. Not one disciple would have thought to question the choice.
And yet—
"Teacher! How can you speak that way? The day the Way of Supreme Peace is realized is not far off. For something to go wrong — for you—!"
White Wave. Han Xian. He was a man who called a thing wrong when it was wrong, and he clearly could not bear to hear his teacher speak of dying.
Zhang Jue listened, then let out a light, sudden laugh.
"It is only an if. Still… what the Emperor wants of us is far too much."
Ox Horn shifted his knees a fraction and came forward.
"Teacher. The news from Luoyang that Senior Brother Yuanyi sent… is it so bad?"
Zhang Jue fell silent again. His disciples waited without a flicker of impatience. At last his mouth opened once more.
"Shi Zimiao is teaching the Emperor's eldest son. If that boy becomes Emperor one day, he will spread the principles of Supreme Peace across All Under Heaven, and then not one of us will need to shed blood."
Zhang Jue shook his head slowly.
"The Emperor, I think, wants only to make use of the structure of the Fang we have built."
Anger flashed across every disciple's face at once.
"That—!"
"Does he have any idea how much patience it takes us just to exchange words with him?"
"Is he not daring to reach for the Teacher's place itself?"
"He, the very root of every misery the people suffer!"
Zhang Jue lifted a hand, quietly. Their voices died.
"The Emperor stands at the summit of Han. Because Liu Bang, the first of them, fought better than any of the other kings, his descendants have ruled All Under Heaven for four hundred years. Four hundred years of drinking the people's blood — that alone is reason enough to tear the thing down. But…"
He let the words hang, then spoke as a man who has made up his mind.
"That path has too many deaths already written into it. If it can be avoided — if fewer people can die — I want to try the other way."
"Teacher!"
"If that is possible, I will gladly yield even the highest seat in this Taiping Dao. Provided, of course, that what the Emperor desires and what we desire coincide, at least in some measure."
The Emperor was attempting something no one had ever achieved. Not even the First Emperor, who had remade the empire from the fiefs of feudal lords into commanderies and counties, had managed it: not the indirect rule of powerful local houses, the great clans, the so-called men of name — but a rule in which the Emperor and the people were joined directly.
If the people themselves had become a systematic organization in the Taiping Dao, and if the Emperor led that Taiping Dao, then it could be done. Even if the officers of the Taiping Dao stood between Emperor and people, their power would be a frail thing beside that of the great clans. Or rather, if the Emperor stood at the summit of the Taiping Dao, even that problem vanished. He would no longer be the exalted one above the exalted. He would be the one the people believed in.
"The Emperor has tried, more than once, to control the powerful houses through eunuchs who can father no sons of their own. But he seems to have felt that such methods have no end. He has concluded, I am told, that unless the foundations of the provinces are shaken all at once, the fighting will never stop."
The thought had left Liu Hong's mouth, passed through the eunuch Zhang Rang and through Ma Yuanyi, and arrived here, at Zhang Jue.
"He appears to believe that if we simply slip free of the great clans' grip in each region, he will have what he wants."
"But that is not for the sake of practicing the Way of Supreme Peace! It is only cutting out the middlemen who skim the profit so that he can do the stripping himself! There may be a worse extraction waiting on the other side!"
"Yes, Flying Swallow. There may."
Zhang Jue looked toward some corner of the courtyard. A faint smile touched his mouth.
"And yet I want to hold this hope. If the Emperor governs the people directly… might the people not also speak to the Emperor directly?"
It might be a delusion. It might be a dream that could never come true in Zhang Jue's lifetime. But was it not a sight to set the heart racing, even as an imagining?
One day a commoner comes to Luoyang, walks up to the palace, and knocks upon the gate without shame. I have something to say, Emperor!
"I will not accomplish everything while I still live. But there is no law that says it can never be accomplished. Not if this will is carried forward across hundreds and thousands of generations."
And so, perhaps, he himself had to take one step forward today.
Zhang Jue raised his head and looked at his disciples, one by one, straight in the eye.
"That is why I have entrusted what comes after to you. If anything should happen to me — no, to the Taiping Dao — you may take the surname Zhang. I ask that someone remember what we have spoken of today, and carry it on."
We left the Kingdom of Changshan and crossed into the Kingdom of Zhongshan.
A pity, but talking up Prince Jing of Zhongshan, Liu Sheng, got us nowhere — and neither did saying the name Liu Bei outright. There was simply no trail to follow here.
"Still just a green boy, I suppose…"
Liu Bei was nineteen this year. Not even twenty. He might not have a courtesy name yet at all, which was why putting out Xuande had bought us nothing. Changsheng, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Jian Yong — we tried them all. Useless.
"Or is he operating somewhere else entirely?"
It stood to reason, when I thought about it. Liu Bei's ancestor, the King of Zhongshan, had been imperial kin of the Former Han. The old princely state of Zhongshan under the Former Han had been abolished long ago. The Zhongshan princes of this age, the Later Han, were imperial kin of the Later Han — a line that did not run back to Liu Bei's forebears at all. If the Former Han Zhongshan line had left Ji Province for You Province, they were complete strangers to the Later Han Zhongshan house.
The only time Liu Bei had been active in Ji Province at all was during the war between Gongsun Zan and Yuan Shao. No wonder we could not find a trace of him here.
We decided, without regret, to leave Zhongshan behind.
"There do seem to be… a great many physicians on the roads, though."
Zhang Liao was right. In every village we passed, we saw people who carried themselves with something of Hua Tuo's air.
"And a great many wearing yellow kerchiefs."
Du Ying was right as well.
"They say His Majesty ordered medicinal herbs sent out everywhere because of the plague. That thing you caught was probably the same one, Bao."
Wei Xu had picked up a clearer picture from the people around us. He was the oldest of us, after all.
"We'd have been in real trouble if we hadn't run into those two old gentlemen."
We would have. And there was a larger trouble coming, I was fairly sure.
If Zhang Jue and his disciples were touring the empire in the guise of physicians, and if the faithful in yellow kerchiefs were already multiplying like this… how vast would they have grown in five years' time?
I was still turning that over when we crossed the border of Zhongshan and entered Zhuo Commandery.
It was not only the commandery that had changed. The province had changed with it. Even so — did the air itself have any right to shift this violently?
"—!"
As if we had triggered a random encounter in some game, a bandit burst out at us, shouting in a language we did not know. Deciding, apparently, that we had failed to understand, they started bellowing in clumsy Chinese.
"Hand it all over! Clothes! Money! And the woman!"
The moment we set foot in Zhuo Commandery — a Wuhuan raid.