A Record of Leaving Youzhou (2)
On the road back to Bingzhou I heard the rest of the story. The Wuhuan "prisoners" Liu Bei had taken were people who had come within a hair's breadth of being put to the sword by Gongsun Zan. Every man of fighting age in their settlement was dead or had fled beyond the frontier. Those left behind were women, children, and the old.
"It was a whim. I didn't do it because I thought I had to save them."
That was what Liu Bei said, but honestly, I wasn't sure.
People don't usually do good because they have decided to do good. More often they simply act, and only afterward does it turn out to have been a kindness. The same rule, of course, applies to wickedness.
Liu Bei, whose sense of right and wrong had been shaped by the Book of Lord Shang and so ran at an angle to ordinary Han thinking—what, exactly, had gone through his mind when he chose to spare those Wuhuan? I couldn't begin to guess.
"Keep them alive and I'll find a use for them somewhere. There's only so many horses you can steal and ride. I'm no horseman myself, and neither are my brothers—Yu, Yong, Fei."
So Liu Bei meant to grow his following from a mere band of wandering swordsmen into a proper cavalry company, and he intended the Wuhuan slaves to manage the horses.
"Most of us Han folk are farmers, or we do work that has to do with farming. I used to weave mats and sell them when I was a boy, because the family had nothing."
If a kinsman hadn't taken him in, he said with a laugh, he never would have learned to read.
"If people who were farmers yesterday are suddenly going to ride, someone has to teach them."
So he means to learn horsemanship from the Wuhuan.
Liu Bei laid out those practical reasons as if they were an excuse, but I had my doubts. From everything I had seen of him so far, the real reason might simply have been that he wanted to do the opposite of whatever Gongsun Zan was doing.
Whatever his motives. If I thought about the future in which Liu Bei would grow into a remarkably successful cavalry commander—and about how he lost every time the supply of warhorses ran dry—his ideas about cavalry were worth listening to.
"Is this your first time traveling beyond Youzhou, Captain Liu?"
"It is."
"Then this would be a good chance to study how cavalry makes a long march, traveling as we are with a Hu migration."
It was a blessing that they were Wuhuan and not Han.
If I had been moving a party of Han people, this long journey from Youzhou through Jizhou into Bingzhou would have been a misery. To a farming people, migration itself is a strange and exhausting thing.
But the Wuhuan were nomads. Even when I set the pace a little faster than I had planned, they kept up without any real trouble. Still, on stretches like Jingxing—where I myself had fallen ill crossing it—I slowed us down, determined that no one would sicken on my watch.
The night we crossed Jingxing and entered the northern tip of Shangdang Commandery in Bingzhou, Guan Yu came to find me. Du Ying was with him.
"Changsheng—I mean, Brother Yu—hasn't even thanked you, Bao."
From the look of him, Du Ying had dragged him here. So that's how it was going to be between these two. Guan Yu, henpecked by his wife.
"I didn't do it to be thanked. It was Tengri's will, nothing more."
Du Ying tapped the back of Guan Yu's heel with her toe. He folded his hands and bowed to me at the waist. I hadn't expected Guan Yu to show this much gratitude.
"I was so overjoyed to see Ying again that I lost my head. Will you accept my apology and my thanks together?"
Even in the dark I could see Du Ying's face flush at his words.
"...I had thought I would never see her again."
Du Ying turned her head. She seemed to be wiping away tears.
"I will repay this debt. Prince of the Xiongnu."
Wanting to lift the heavy mood a little, I asked with a playful smile,
"And how do you mean to repay it?"
Guan Yu thought for a moment, then answered.
"I killed a man who meant to do Ying a terrible wrong and who was terrorizing the people of my hometown, and I fled. After that I decided that scholar-officials and feudal lords were all no better than beasts."
The verdict history would leave on Guan Yu: arrogant. But that record, which sits so oddly beside the one that says he was generous to the weak, is not a record of who Guan Yu truly was. It is a record of what the men who wrote about Guan Yu thought of him.
If his attitude toward scholar-officials, feudal lords—the great men of the world—had hardened because of what happened with Du Ying, it was not hard to understand.
"I cannot take that thought back entirely. But with you, Prince of the Xiongnu, I will not set my stubbornness against you."
"Hm."
Hoping Guan Yu's nature would change completely was probably too much to ask. A pity.
"So not setting your stubbornness against me is how you repay the debt?"
"No. I mean that even in a matter I might have turned my back on, had it been any other scholar-official or lord—I will help you."
The boy Guan Yu straightened and made his declaration.
I burst out laughing.
Yes. That was Guan Yu.
One kindness wasn't going to pry Guan Yu away from Liu Bei. Even if the bond between Liu Bei and Guan Yu was not yet the sworn brotherhood the Records of the Three Kingdoms would describe, Guan Yu's character would never allow it.
I was about to nod my acceptance when—
CRACK!
Du Ying's palm came down across Guan Yu's back.
"What kind of rude thing is that to say, Brother Yu! A lifetime wouldn't be enough to repay him!"
Was it my imagination, or did Guan Yu actually stagger? He looked at Du Ying in helpless embarrassment—and then someone else came walking up from a distance.
"Brother Yu, you here? Ah, Sister-in-law too. I heard a sound like leather splitting in a thunderclap and wondered what it was."
At Zhang Fei's complete lack of tact I couldn't help but laugh. Then I turned to Sister Ying.
"The moment we return to Bingzhou, I'll put up some of my own wealth so the two of you can hold a wedding."
Du Ying covered her cheeks.
"Oh my, a wedding..."
That alone made the announcement worthwhile. The silent Wait! that flashed across Guan Yu's face was a small pleasure of its own.
A year had turned while we were away in Youzhou. It was now the third year of Guanghe in the Later Han—the year 180 by the Western calendar.
I was eight years old. Huchuquan, and Zhang Liao with him, had turned twelve.
As the journey continued I summoned Zhang Liao and gave him an order.
"Spar with Guan Yu and Zhang Fei. Just enough to take the measure of their skill."
Of course a twelve-year-old Zhang Liao could not beat a nineteen-year-old Guan Yu or a sixteen-year-old Zhang Fei. But Zhang Liao was Zhang Liao. He could gauge how good they were, and they could grow a little closer.
My junior martial brother Zhang Liao made no complaint. In the pauses of the march he spent his time sparring with Guan Yu or Zhang Fei.
"They don't compare to our master, but they are formidable men."
Zhang Liao came back scraped in a dozen places and made his report.
"Is that so?"
"Yes. It was like watching the martial arts of Youzhou, different from Bingzhou's."
"But you're still the better horseman, aren't you?"
"I am."
I grinned and asked the other question—the one that told me how well the sparring's second purpose had been served.
"And you, Liao? How did it feel for you?"
"I can tell my own skill has risen, Senior Brother."
If Liu Bei ever slipped from my grasp—if Guan Yu and Zhang Fei were bound so tightly as his men that I could never bring them over—then I would need to raise someone who could one day stand against them. The seed called Zhang Liao would be more than enough.
Most people, hearing the name Zhang Liao, think of the humiliation he dealt Sun Quan at Hefei. But I, as the Xiongnu's Liu Bao, had my eye on something else.
The campaign against Tadun, King of the Wuhuan. A man who, at his height, had ranged as far as Xuzhou, plundered the Central Plains, and whom even Yuan Shao, hegemon of Hebei, had barely managed to soothe. The Wuhuan sovereign whom neither Gongsun Zan nor Yuan Shao could handle—and the Zhang Liao standing before me would be the one to take him. Cao Cao had been so delighted by that news that he had clapped and danced on horseback, or so they said.
In other words, Zhang Liao was a talent who would shine in wars against the northern nomads. The talent I would need when the day came to conquer Mobei.
"Well then."
I took up a staff for the first time in a long while. It felt a little awkward, a senior martial brother asking this of his junior.
"Shall I ask my junior brother for a lesson?"
"Bao! Huchuquan!"
Yufuluo, the Right Guli King and my father, came out to greet his son and his youngest brother.
I let myself be folded into his arms, then turned toward the small child hiding behind our mother.
"Qubei, go greet your big brother."
Mother, who had shed the last traces of girlhood, gave Qubei a gentle push between the shoulders. Qubei toddled out and buried his face in my stomach. I gathered my little brother close and stroked his hair. And as I did, Mother's warm arms closed around both of us.
The history of nomadic empires is stained with wars of succession among brothers, cousins, uncles and nephews. But there must have been moments like this one too, when a family simply shared its affection. This was no lie.
Back on Southern Xiongnu land after a year away, I spent a little time as neither prince nor Khagan nor anything else—only the eldest son of Yufuluo's family.
"Bao. About that..."
When the two of us were out inspecting the nearby pastures, Yufuluo murmured to me.
"Ever since the day you prophesied that this father of yours would become Dargha—Chanyu."
"Yes."
"I've told myself that whatever strange things you do, they must be Tengri's will. But what do you mean to do with those people?"
By "those people" Father meant Liu Bei's band of wandering swordsmen and the Wuhuan "prisoners."
"I expect the Han party will help me with a few things and then go back to Youzhou. The Wuhuan captives will stay."
"So you mean to make slaves of them?"
That was the conclusion a nomad would naturally reach.
"No, Father... I have something in mind."
"What is it?"
"I want a tribe of my own."
Yufuluo looked startled. Among nomadic nobility it is common for sons—especially from the eldest down, leaving only the youngest at home—to strike out and lead their own followings. Yufuluo must have expected that I would become independent someday. But eight years old was early, perhaps.
It was necessary all the same. This would be the first test of whether I could truly become the hegemon of the north, a lord of many peoples.
"I won't take my tribe far from yours. I mean to give the Wuhuan the work of preparing the rites—whatever is needed when we serve Tengri and the goddesses."
I had borrowed this idea from elsewhere as well. Take, for instance, King Gwanggaeto of Goguryeo. He had brought captives north from the Han peoples of the southern peninsula and set them as tomb-keepers to tend the royal mounds. Among the Israelites who left Egypt, too, there had been a tribe set apart to tend the sacrifices to their god.
Rather than force the Wuhuan to live mixed among us from the start, I wanted to give them a defined role inside Southern Xiongnu society and let them dissolve into it naturally. And if it came to it, I could always use them as my household cavalry. If the experiment succeeded, I could apply it later—to unification with the remnants of the Northern Xiongnu, even to absorbing the Xianbei.
Only the last step remained: persuading Father Yufuluo.
"Sister Ying can't handle the shamanism and the sacrifices all by herself. And..."
I looked Yufuluo straight in the eye.
"The work of a Grand Shaman is not going to be as easy as it was in Great-Grandfather's time."
In the year 180, this oral tradition began to circulate among the Wuhuan who had been taken into the Southern Xiongnu.