Rumors of the Tiger
The old Chanyu had no choice but to stall for time.
"The spring rites have only just ended. To summon the Four Horns and the Six Horns again so soon would be no simple matter. Let us first drive back the Xianbei who have crossed our borders. Once that is done, we shall take this question up in earnest at the summer encampment."
Zhang Xiu, the Zhonglangjiang Protecting the Xiongnu, nodded as though he were prepared, for the moment, to accept that answer.
"But the time I can hold back His Majesty the Emperor's wrath is not long. If the Emperor himself should inquire into this matter..." He let the rest hang in the air. "You understand, I trust?"
"That," the Chanyu said, "is a burden I will bear myself."
It was a warning not to grow any more insolent. Zhang Xiu snorted, turned on his heel, and strode out of the royal yurt. Han warriors, armed far more richly than any Xiongnu soldier, followed at his back, their armor clanking with every step.
The old Chanyu — Tute Ruoshi Gongzhu Chanyu, Grand Chanyu of the Southern Xiongnu — sank back into his seat.
"Father!"
Hozheng, the Left Wise King, started toward him. The old Chanyu lifted a hand and stopped him where he stood.
Composing his own heart could wait. What pressed on him was the need to do something — anything — for his people.
"The Han believe they alone remember history, and that we do not."
"...Father?"
"We will not end as Gute Ruoshi Grand Chanyu and his Left Wise King ended, Hozheng."
"Then...?"
"Send men to Luoyang. I have been feeding bribes to certain eunuchs and officials against precisely a day like this."
He had carved the cost of those gifts from a household that had nothing to spare, and scattered the silver through the politics of the capital. Emperor Ling — Liu Hong — was a man who loved a bribe. If even a portion of that money found its way into the Emperor's own hands, His Majesty would not pretend he had never heard the Chanyu's request.
"Father...!"
Hozheng looked at him with a face caught somewhere between wonder and gratitude, and at last a smile touched the old Chanyu's mouth.
"Because the Han fitted us with a yoke, we in turn can drive a blade into the Han's own heart. You must remember the tale of Junchen Grand Chanyu and Zhang Qian."
"Junchen Grand Chanyu's..."
Long ago, the legendary Grand Chanyu Modu had raised the Xiongnu into a great empire. Junchen had been Modu's grandson.
In Junchen's reign, a man named Liu Che took the Han throne — the man later ages would call Emperor Wu. Liu Che dispatched his minister Zhang Qian into the Western Regions, with orders to forge an alliance with the Yuezhi, whom the Xiongnu had driven from their lands. Zhang Qian had scarcely set out before Junchen Grand Chanyu seized him.
And this was what Junchen said to his captive.
The old Chanyu quoted those words, and looked hard into his eldest son's eyes.
"Junchen Grand Chanyu sat in the north, and still he saw through the Han's dealings with Nanyue, far beyond their vast country, all the way to the southern sea. We too must read the Han's politics with a keen eye — however distant they may seem."
The lavish hospitality shown to merchants who came and went through Bing Province to buy horses and livestock existed for days exactly like this one.
Hozheng nodded, his gaze as grave as his father's.
"I will carve it into my heart."
Then he tilted his head.
"But how do you mean to move Luoyang?"
The old Chanyu's answer was brief.
"By replacing the Zhonglangjiang Protecting the Xiongnu."
"Can we decide who comes next?"
"I doubt it. It will be difficult. But among the rumors that have reached me, one has caught my interest."
"What rumor?"
"Zhang Min, Inspector of Yang Province. And yet it is not Zhang Min himself who holds my attention. It is the tiger he keeps at his side — the one who bears the surname Sun."
The tiger's name, they said, was Sun Jian. Barely nineteen, if the reports were true.
"Yang Province is very far, Father. And he is a warrior no one has even heard of."
"Just so. If he is summoned to Bing Province in Zhang Min's train, he will have no local base. And he is still young..."
The corner of the old Chanyu's mouth drew into a smile he never showed another living soul — a savage smile, Western Rong and Northern Di mixed in a single alien face, the very look that made Han men recoil.
My father Yufuluo, they told me, had gathered at the camp of my grandfather Qiangqu.
Grandfather — Right Wise King of the Southern Xiongnu — had pulled in Yufuluo and every nearby force as fast as the horses would run, then fallen on the Xianbei as they finished their raiding and turned for home. He had hurt them, after a fashion. Some of the Han and Xiongnu captives had been cut free.
But only after a fashion.
"We couldn't push the pursuit any deeper."
Father tipped his cup in front of Mother and muttered it like a man swallowing something bitter.
Mother laid her hand gently on Yufuluo's muscled arm and tried to soothe him.
"You did everything you could. And you came back alive to our Bao. That is what matters."
Yufuluo looked from her face to mine and smiled. He could not quite hide the taste behind the smile.
"Tanshihuai of the Xianbei. The scouts reported his main host was prowling out there, and we had to pull back. If we'd pressed on, we might have gotten every last prisoner home."
Tanshihuai.
The name made me frown. Of course, all that earned me was this:
"Oh, Bao. Does something hurt?"
Mother simply gathered me up. I felt her palm patting my back until a burp came, and I turned the name over on my tongue.
Ten years still remained until 184, when the Three Kingdoms truly began. This was a story from a decade before that story, and so Tanshihuai was not a man most people would call famous.
But without Tanshihuai, the Three Kingdoms would never have started at all — or the opening of it would have been a very different thing.
The Three Kingdoms begins with the event called the Yellow Turban Rebellion, or the uprising of the Taiping Dao. It was a popular revolt against the Han's crushing government. And why had Han government grown so crushing?
The court itself had gone to rot, yes. But the burden of defense had swollen as well. And the single greatest cause of that swollen defense budget was Tanshihuai of the Xianbei.
He had founded his own state around 156. That made this the nineteenth year of his rule. In those nineteen years he had unified the Xianbei and conquered in every direction — east as far as the country north of Liaodong Commandery, west as far as the lands north of the Wusun in the Western Regions. A Xianbei empire spanning fourteen thousand li from east to west and seven thousand from north to south. Its master was Tanshihuai.
Thirty-eight years old, this year.
Whether it was Tanshihuai himself or the man who came after him, the Xianbei would one day be an enemy I had to face.
I put all my impatience into a shout.
"Yabu! Yabu!"
Father heard me and gave a short laugh.
"Is that warrior Lü Bu better than your own father, then?"
He glanced at Mother.
"I think Bao holds Lü Bu's kindness in higher regard than I realized."
"Why not invite him to another banquet?"
"True enough. My son says once was not enough. Will that do, Bao?"
"Yabu!"
"They tell me Lü Bu's horsemanship does not yield to the Xiongnu or the Xianbei, and that he is deadly with a ji besides."
Yes. That. More of that.
Mother took up the thread at once.
"If it had not been for Lord Lü, I cannot bear to think what those Xianbei arrows would have done to us. He knocked every one of them aside with that long weapon. I saw it with my own eyes and still could not believe it. And being a man of Wuyuan Commandery, I suppose, he is easy in our tongue as well."
"Is that so." Yufuluo's face darkened, and he sat a moment with his thoughts. "Come to think of it, I hear the Zhonglangjiang paid a visit to Grandfather's Chanyu court not long ago."
"These are winter years, with the Xiongnu under the Han's heel. Cultivating a friendship with an outstanding Han warrior would not be a foolish thing."
"Yaaah!"
"Bao. Once you are big enough to hold a weapon, I will ask that warrior Lü Bu to take you as his student."
Father — I will grow with everything I have in me.
I ate as if eating were a campaign. I climbed onto my father's horse and took his teaching while we rode the length and breadth of Bing Province. I tried to turn everything I saw into food for the body and the mind. In that way, a year burned down to its end.
Even out here on the fringes of Bing Province, word of heroes carried.
In 172, the year before I was born, a man named Xu Chang rose in rebellion in Kuaiji Commandery of Yang Province and styled himself Emperor of Yue. He shared a name with a famous city. He made his son Xu Zhao General-in-Chief, and against the Han armies sent to crush him he fought with a stubbornness that would not break.
Ah — but the city called Xuchang does not exist yet. In this age that place is only Xu, or Xu County.
At any rate, the rebellion ran through the whole of 173, the year of my birth, and was not put down until 174 — the same year the Xianbei struck us and Lü Bu pulled us out of the fire. It was Zhang Min, Inspector of Yang Province, and the young soldier under his command, Sun Jian, who finally broke it.
The south had scarcely been settled before Tanshihuai moved again in the north.
This time he reached for Liang Province, west of Bing. Beidi Commandery in Liang Province butted against Bing Province's western border, and so the district fell inside the defensive charge of the Xiongnu Chanyu. Our Xiongnu host and the Bing Province army were sent out as a matter of course.
My father, Yufuluo, the Right Guli King. My grandfather Qiangqu, the Right Wise King. My granduncle Hozheng, the Left Wise King. And, of course, Lü Bu.
"...All we did was hand Ha Yu a gift."
Ha Yu, it seemed, was Grand Administrator of Beidi Commandery.
"The reward that falls to the Xiongnu and the Bing Province army for driving Tanshihuai off is not even a rat's tail. And Ha Yu is promoted to Colonel Protecting the Wuhuan."
Colonel Protecting the Wuhuan: a title that meant, more or less, what Zhonglangjiang Protecting the Xiongnu meant for us. He would administer the Wuhuan. Which meant that a man named Ha Yu would now be free to commit, before the kings and chanyus of the Wuhuan, every insolence Zhang Xiu had committed in my great-grandfather's royal yurt.
The man sitting beside my muttering father tried to ease him. It was Lü Bu.
"More than a few died under the Xianbei, but Bing Province itself was not the one that took the beating. We take our comfort where we can."
I had pestered my father with Lü Bu's name often enough that Yufuluo had invited him back more than once to share a cup. The acquaintance struck in those evenings seemed, through the defense of Beidi, to have hardened into the love of men who had stood in the same fight.
"Mm. At least they did not take Bing Province's herds."
Yufuluo was twenty-five this year. Lü Bu was nineteen. It was exactly the gap from which a brotherhood might grow.
"If the seed-grain of the fields is life itself to a Han man, livestock is life itself to the Xiongnu."
"You were born in Wuyuan and grew up among us. Of course you know our hearts."
"In Luoyang..." Lü Bu caught himself. "No. Forget Luoyang. Even in Taiyuan they would call a man like me pro-Xiongnu. If that is so, then the Xiongnu ought to be the home of my heart, should they not?"
Yufuluo laughed under his breath and clapped Lü Bu's shoulder.
"I have thought of you as a brother since the day you saved my wife and my son."
"An honor, Right Guli King."
"I do not say it lightly. Ah — but before that. I hear you have come into a command of your own."
"A dozen men, if that. And only because the officers above me and the men next in line all got themselves killed."
"That you reached even that at nineteen — and that you came back alive beside me — is proof enough you are an extraordinary warrior."
"I am glad I lived to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Right Guli King."
"...Something I felt this time. If I keep being dragged about on the court's campaigns, I may die on any given day. So may I ask one thing of you?"
"The Right Guli King, asking me...? No. Just give the order."
"I have no authority to command you. You belong to the Bing Province army. I ask this because I think of you as a brother. I watched you on the field. Your martial skill is beyond mine. Starting next year, I want you to teach our Bao a little of that skill."
"I... the Right Guli King's heir?"
"What is there to teach a child of two or three? But this is not only a request for a martial instructor. You understand me?"
Yufuluo was not merely granting his son's wish. He was looking down the road of an outstanding Han warrior's future, and tying me to Lü Bu while he could. Even if Yufuluo himself died in some far camp, if his son had Lü Bu's protection, that son might live.
Lü Bu did not look away from Yufuluo's eyes. He nodded, heavily.
"As the Right Guli King wishes."
The year became 175 by the Western count. There was a Han era name for it as well, something I heard and let slide; it meant nothing to me. Nine years until the Yellow Turban Rebellion. My own age: three. Those were the facts that mattered.
The moment I could put one swaying foot in front of the other, Lü Bu's teaching came down — a little harshly, for a child. Harshly, in this case, meant a stick no better than a twig, and doing as I was told: holding a stance, or swinging the thing with little shouts of yah, yah.
"No. That is strange."
Lü Bu looked at me and tipped his head.
"A three-year-old, with patience this deep?"
The heart of Yufuluo's request had been that Lü Bu become my guardian. The martial drill was only the rite by which that bond was confirmed. In another light it was not so different from an uncle coming by to play — and a man of the Bing Province army could not come often to the Right Guli King's camp.
Besides, what Lü Bu asked of me was not truly play. He must have expected that I, Luanti Bao, a child of only three, would lose interest in a handful of visits. Amuse him a little and let it go — that had likely been the plan. He had to set the plan aside.
"...Now follow this."
Lü Bu settled into a stance. I copied him as best as these short arms and legs would allow. When I fell, I did not cry.
To Lü Bu's eyes, that seemed a wonder worth staring at.
"This is as far as teaching a three-year-old goes. But once you are older, I will have to teach you in earnest."
The words I had wanted more than any other.
"Sank you!"
I bowed my head to my master, and Lü Bu's great hand came down and smoothed my hair.
Peaceful days slid past in just that way, grazing the lands of the nomads like a slow wind.
A war-cloud. That was the word they used, likening the mood of coming battle to a sky gone dark.
Word arrived that the Zhonglangjiang Protecting the Xiongnu had been replaced — Zhang Xiu out, and in his place Zhang Min, the war hero of the south. And with that news came another rumor: that Zhang Min had brought a tiger with him.
A tiger named Sun Jian.