Jia Xu and Dong Zhuo
"His Majesty would never abandon me like this!"
In the manor of Duan Jiong, there was only one man who could howl those words like a beaten dog — Duan Jiong himself.
"He named me Grand Commandant again! And now he snatches the office back after a mere few months? How is that possible?!"
The sight of a veteran past seventy thrashing about in a rage was nothing anyone would call pleasant. Before him sat two men of about thirty — Jia Xu and Duan Wai — both with their eyes closed and their heads bowed.
Jia Xu, like Duan Jiong, was a man of Wuwei Commandery in Liangzhou. He had first entered office under Duan Jiong's eye, then resigned some six years past. He had been living quietly in his native Wuwei when Duan Jiong, through a distant kinsman named Duan Wai, asked to borrow his wits. And so Jia Xu now resided in the manor as a guest.
"I! The merit I have piled up — do you know how much it is? In my youth I drove east as far as the Liaodong Dependent State and threw back the Xianbei. I went west and crushed the rebellions of the Qiang!"
He calls it merit that he threw back the Xianbei while Commandant of the Liaodong Dependent State... but he was caught forging an imperial order and served two years for it.
Jia Xu swallowed the words and held his tongue. The old man's familiar habit had surfaced — that long, wandering urge to unspool the years of his glory, to begin every tale with it was in those days...
"In the time of Emperor Shun the Eastern Qiang and the Western Qiang joined hands, and a great rebellion rose! Under the previous Emperor — Emperor Huan — I was named Protecting Qiang Colonel, and through the Yanxi years, from 158 to 167, I smashed the Qiang wherever I found them: in Longxi Commandery, in Zhangye Commandery, and beyond Liangzhou itself, all the way into Bingzhou, dozens of times over!"
Impressive enough, I'll grant him that... Jia Xu nodded with his eyes still shut.
"Yes! Wenhe! You've heard it often enough — you know! When I was in the thick of fighting the Qiang..."
"...you were slandered."
"That dog of an Inspector of Liangzhou! He accused me of refusing to move my army on purpose! Yes! That's it! I've been slandered this time as well!"
Jia Xu opened his eyes and lifted his head. The old general's gaze was shining, as if he could not believe he had not thought of it sooner — as if he were lucky to have seized the idea even now. In those aged eyes, a hollow hope was already hardening into certainty.
"It was the same then! The people of Liangzhou came all the way to Luoyang and petitioned for my innocence before the palace gates! Wenhe! Go to Liangzhou and gather me some men, will you? Hm? If the common folk of Liangzhou petition again, His Majesty will not turn his face away..."
"...Grand Commandant."
He was Grand Commandant no longer, yet Jia Xu addressed him with the old courtesy. There was a weight in that voice that drained the heat from Duan Jiong's excitement. Jia Xu's tone, and the sharp light in his eyes, had that kind of force.
"Since Tian Yan and Ha Yu bought their way out of prison, have either of them called on you even once?"
It was Duan Wai, not Duan Jiong, who reacted first.
"Wenhe!"
Jia Xu raised a hand and cut him off.
"Even after you were restored as Grand Commandant, those two never came to pay their respects. Do you truly not understand what that means?"
Duan Jiong's jaw began to tremble.
After the expedition against Tanshihuai had ended in failure, the man named Grand Commandant had been Qiao Xuan. Word was that Qiao Xuan was on reasonably familiar terms with Consultant Cao Cao and with the Turbid Stream as well. At the news of Qiao Xuan's appointment, Duan Jiong had collapsed into despair. I will never sit as Grand Commandant again. They know I stood behind Tian Yan. They will come for my crimes...
It was then that Jia Xu had urged him to leave the capital.
"Zhang Huan, who once served as Colonel of the Household Protecting the Xiongnu, resigned of his own accord and has spent years shut away in Hongnong Commandery. What Zhang Huan did is the surest way a man can keep his own head! If Wuwei Commandery is too far, then at the very least go down as far as Hongnong, as he did — or to Anding!"
Duan Jiong had only snorted.
"Zhang Huan is a fool. On the one hand he let the eunuchs lead him by the nose and took part in the killing of Dou Wu and Chen Fan. After that he went sniffing around the Pure Stream, earned His Majesty's hatred, and was driven from Luoyang. He is not a man worth imitating."
A few months passed without incident. At least, without incident for Duan Jiong. Empress Song died, and her father Song Feng died with her, but none of that had anything to do with him. Then Grand Commandant Qiao Xuan resigned, citing age and illness, and Duan Jiong's face brightened once more. When the Emperor restored him as Grand Commandant, he even preened in front of Jia Xu.
"What did I tell you! Wait for the hour, and the road opens like this!"
Who would have thought he would be stripped of office in a few months — no, in a single month?
...Jia Xu had thought it.
"This Emperor's method is to make a minister tremble once, then set his mind at ease — and only then discard him! You must get your person out of this city!"
He had offered that counsel. Duan Jiong had not so much as pretended to hear it. Twice he had ignored Jia Xu's advice, and that was how they had arrived at today. Today, Jia Xu offered his counsel a third time.
"Everyone but the Grand Commandant knew it would come to this. No — I suspect even Regular Attendant Wang Fu was not unaware."
"Silence!"
Duan Jiong began to rage again.
"I was slandered, and I was still restored as Protecting Qiang Colonel! I smashed the alliance of the Eastern Qiang and the Western Qiang, and I hunted the Western Qiang to the end and brought them to heel! And the present Emperor himself asked me about the pacification of the Eastern Qiang and named me General Who Pacifies the Qiang! I am the man who pacified both the Western Qiang and the Eastern Qiang!"
He poured the words out so fast Jia Xu had no room to answer.
"At Mount Fengyi! In Anding and in Hanyang! I fought the Eastern Qiang and I won! And after that? When His Majesty struck down the traitors Dou Wu and Chen Fan, I stood at the front! I am the Emperor's blade! ...There is a purpose in all of this! He is not a man who would abandon me like this!"
Duan Jiong's eyes flashed toward Jia Xu.
"You! Jia Xu! Going to Liangzhou and gathering petitions is no hard thing! Why will you not grant me even that?!"
"...Grand Commandant. Liangzhou has three men of name. The first is yourself. The second is Zhang Huan. The third is Huangfu Gui."
At the names of Zhang Huan and Huangfu Gui, Duan Jiong faltered. He mocked them to their faces, but he knew they were the only commanders who could be set beside him. No — as shi, as men of standing, they stood several paces ahead of him.
"Huangfu Gui remonstrated that the previous Emperor's government had fallen into disorder. When he was not heard, he took ill and died. Zhang Huan still lives in seclusion in Hongnong Commandery. And you, Grand Commandant? You took the eunuchs' hands and made enemies of the Pure Stream — and the one strategy you did put forward was trampled under Xianbei hooves!"
"Wenhe...!"
Duan Wai tried to stop him again, but Jia Xu was already on his feet.
"Huangfu Gui is a man of Anding Commandery. Zhang Huan is a man of Dunhuang Commandery! The people of Liangzhou may honor those two. They will have nothing to honor in you! As you say, Dou Wu may have been a traitorous imperial in-law, and Chen Fan may have been nothing but a treacherous minister! But the things you have done — how are they any better than theirs?"
Jia Xu bowed once, properly, and turned on his heel. Against his retreating back, the old man's voice came thin and spent.
"...Then what am I supposed to do... Wenhe..."
Jia Xu's feet stopped. A voice that trembled, just slightly, with pity offered Duan Jiong its last counsel.
"My schemes have reached their limit. I no longer know how to save the Grand Commandant. But I can still save the house of Duan."
Before Duan Jiong or Duan Wai could take the meaning, Jia Xu's next words were already in the air.
With that single line he left the room, and Duan Wai came bursting out after him.
"Jia Xu!"
"...I won't fault you for dropping my courtesy name, Chongming."
"You're always like this!"
Jia Xu's closed lips tightened.
Like this.
Jia Xu remembered a thing from five years ago — or was it six.
He had abandoned office and was going home to Wuwei Commandery in Liangzhou. West of Chang'an, Guanzhong crawled with furious Qiang and Di. The ringleaders of the revolt had been executed through Duan Jiong's campaigns, but the remnants had never been fully swept up, and the road was still a dangerous place. On that road Jia Xu and his companions were taken by a band of Di holdouts.
Jia Xu had shouted.
"I am the maternal grandson of the General Who Pacifies the Qiang! Kill me if you must, but keep my corpse apart from the others! One day the Duan clan will come looking for my body — and they will make you pay!"
The claim of kinship was a lie, of course. But the Di feared Duan Jiong's name, and they let Jia Xu go. As he fled, the screams of the rest of his party — butchered behind him, dying ugly — and their resentment reached his ears.
The schemes of a man whose cunning was already proverbial even in Liangzhou... perhaps they had always been schemes that demanded a sacrifice. Schemes that never solved the thing at its root.
Jia Xu poured that old fury into the man standing in front of him, and he shouted it at Duan Wai.
"If we are to keep Chongming and the rest of the Duan clan alive, there is no other way! Dou Wu and Song Feng would not give up their seats. They hung on, thinking perhaps — and their entire houses were slaughtered!"
The sudden heat in Jia Xu's temper made Duan Wai falter.
"If the Grand Commandant chooses death himself, the Emperor will find it awkward to carry the crime as far as the Duan clan! We have to bargain with the Emperor using the Grand Commandant's life!"
Jia Xu did not go to Duan Jiong's funeral. He went instead to look at another head, spiked for display. The head of Regular Attendant Wang Fu.
He had been staring up at it for some time when someone came and stood beside him.
"I once campaigned with Grand Commandant Duan against the Qiang rebellions, so I went to the funeral. I didn't see you there, Wenhe."
Jia Xu turned, asking who it was, and found a man of about forty. A powerful frame. The shoulders in particular were massively developed, and they said more about the pitch of his archery than any introduction could have.
This man... Jia Xu turned over several names in his mind. The man they said wore two bow-cases and loosed arrows to the left and the right as he pleased.
"Administrator Dong, is it not?"
Dong Zhuo, Administrator of Hedong. He laughed — a big, booming sound.
"What brings Your Excellency here...?"
"I told you. I'm on my way back from Grand Commandant Duan's funeral."
Jia Xu said nothing, taking the measure of the man, and Dong Zhuo stepped in close.
"Life is a truly unknowable thing, isn't it, Wenhe?"
"I don't follow you."
"Wang Fu's power once looked as if it would cover the world, and now it is a lonely neck on a spike. Grand Commandant Duan's funeral cannot keep the mourners away. If you ask whether this is a matter of right and wrong — it is not. Because..."
Dong Zhuo's mouth twisted.
"A man may win the same merits and still receive no rank at all, simply because he was not close to the eunuchs — and spend what is left of his life shut up in Hongnong Commandery."
Jia Xu remembered. Dong Zhuo had begun his career under Zhang Huan. He was not a man of Duan Jiong's camp, as Jia Xu was. Not quite an enemy — but there was no reason they should be friends. Why, then, had this man come looking for him?
"Let's talk a little about how the world is turning."