A Fight Beyond the Map (2)

As Liu Hong left the hall, the Regular Palace Attendants Zhang Rang and Zhao Zhong fell in at his side.

Liu Hong glanced down at himself. A few spatters of blood had caught on his robes and shoes. He stripped them off and flung them aside.

At a flick of Zhao Zhong's eyes, young eunuchs came running with fresh clothes and footwear, gathered up what the emperor had discarded, and vanished into the shadows.

Liu Hong held out a hand ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠to Zhang Rang. Zhang Rang dropped to his knees. Dried blood had crusted in the seams of the emperor's nails.

Palace maids approached with a basin of water. Zhang Rang soaked a length of white silk in it and wiped Liu Hong's hands with painstaking care.

It was not as though Zhang Rang felt nothing at the emperor's mad slaughter. A man who could not swallow even the smallest frown, even the faintest bitterness of expression, never rose as far as Regular Palace Attendant. That was the eunuch's discipline ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠his teacher had beaten into him — Cao Teng, grandfather of Cao Cao.

Watching the blood bloom through the silk, Zhang Rang decided to be grateful that the empress had not been the day's quarry. Had it been Empress He who died instead of Lady Wang, he himself — bound to the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠empress by marriage ties — would not have walked away clean. Then again, the emperor had taken a shine to his new hunting dog, his new toy: He Jin. Zhang Rang would likely stay safe until that novelty wore off.

His eyes met Zhao Zhong's. Taking the glance as his cue, Zhang Rang offered the emperor something else to think about.

"Your Majesty. Tanshihuai appears to be on the move."

"Oho. So the beast that gobbled up Our army has finally stirred."

Zhang Rang could not say what he was thinking — You were the one who shoved those soldiers into the beast's jaws — so he kept smoothing the emperor's robes and waited for whatever came next.

"I heard he'd been mustering troops north of the Yin Mountains, didn't I?"

"That is so, Your Majesty."

"Then he'll hit Bingzhou. Are Bingzhou's forces moving to meet him?"

"The Xiongnu Chanyu is said to have gathered his host first and already marched north."

"And the Inspector of Bingzhou? The Colonel Protector of the Xiongnu? Are they slow to respond?"

"Well…"

Zhang Rang let the sentence die. To go on at any length would have meant talking about the last campaign's defeat.

"Short on troops, then. Lean too hard on the Xiongnu and they'll lose face. If the Xiongnu break as well, the Xianbei will come straight down the Yellow River into Sili."

Liu Hong reached the conclusion as if it cost him nothing, and he did not wait for his Regular Palace Attendants to react before he gave the order.

"We'll use Dong Zhuo. He's sitting in Hedong. Tell him to advance north along the Yellow River."

"Is this what you meant by walking the line between competence and incompetence, Wenhe?"

Jia Xu, who had been gazing absently at the edict brushed onto silk, gave a short, dry laugh.

"The emperor is a cunning one."

"That's nothing new. The man was born a monster of power. There's no other way to explain how he's been filling the palace with the stink of blood since he was twelve or thirteen."

"And a dangerous one. Even if his judgment is wrong and Your Excellency becomes the Xianbei army's next meal — even if Luoyang itself pays the price — he carries himself as if none of it is his concern."

"And he's telling me, If you don't want to croak, figure it out yourself."

"Doing this by halves has just become very difficult."

"So what now, Wenhe?"

"We do everything in our power to survive the Xianbei invasion — and we make sure that 'everything' is undervalued."

Jia Xu tapped the wooden slips and bamboo strips piled around him, one after another.

"Keep the Qiang cavalry and Han spearmen who came with Your Excellency from Liangzhou as the core of our strength. But what we actually throw into the field should be Hedong's own troops, and whatever Bingzhou sends us."

"And that wins us the war?"

"We don't win it. We arrive in time to stand in a war that's already being won."

"Leave it to the Xiongnu, then?"

"If it truly comes to the brink, we'll have no choice but to commit Your Excellency's elite. But if all we do is lend the Xiongnu a little help, buying a victory on the cheap is not out of the question."

Dong Zhuo threw his head back and roared with laughter.

"So we help the Xiongnu beat the Xianbei, and we keep our best troops intact. And when the victory comes, we don't call it our glory — we just happen to have had a foot in a Xiongnu win?"

"We survive. And we can still lay at the emperor's feet the picture he wants: a victory that did not lean entirely on the Xiongnu."

"Long as we don't get dragged into Luoyang for no damn reason. The moment we set foot in that city, we stop being men of Liangzhou and become a blade Liangzhou forged, dancing in some Luoyang bastard's hand. When we go to Luoyang…"

"…it will be when we can sweep the Luoyang bastards off the board whenever we please."

Jia Xu and Dong Zhuo looked at each other and grinned.

In the business of armies, the longer a decision takes, the less hesitation there is once it is made. The entire Xiongnu host that had gathered at Meiji County crossed the Yellow River northward and struck out for Wuyuan Commandery.

Once leaving Meiji County, once leaving Wuyuan, and once more passing the Guanglu Frontier Wall: three crossings of the Great Wall. In the west of Bingzhou the Wall ran three layers deep. Four, to be precise — but the fourth lay south of Meiji County, among the defenses of Shang Commandery, and that was another story.

Why three layers here, and nowhere else?

The Xiongnu heartland had never been the Mobei Steppe. It had been the Hetao Plateau. The climate was far milder, and the land was fit for growing the grain you fed your horses. The notion that nomads did no farming was a settled people's conceit. Nomads put a great deal of labor into their fields. The country around the Han Sea — Lake Baikal — had been a place of exile for Han envoys who crossed a Chanyu, but it was also a country of farms worked by Han who had been dragged north or had fled there themselves. They grew grain, yes — though more of it went into the horses' troughs than onto men's tables.

Of the three walls, the two northern belts, the ones nearest the Yin Mountains, had been built by Zhao. The southern belt, covering Shang Commandery and Xihe Commandery, was Qin's. From the days of Touman Chanyu, father of Grand Chanyu Modu, the Xiongnu had tried, little by little, to halt Zhao and Qin's northward push and take the Hetao Plateau back. The First Emperor judged that effort an intolerable threat. He conquered the plateau outright and joined the walls of his Qin forebears to those of Zhao, finishing a triple line of defense. That he took such care was no mystery: immediately south of the Hetao Plateau lay Guanzhong, the Qin heartland itself.

The Han inherited that triple wall. Chang'an, capital of the Western Han, was nothing more than a city raised around the old Qin pleasure palace of Xinglegong, its name changed to the Palace of Lasting Joy. But by the late Eastern Han — by the years I was living in — even that triple line…

"…has fallen completely to pieces."

That was Chanyu Hozheng's verdict as we passed the Guanglu Frontier Wall, north of Wuyuan Commandery.

I was not the only one on the march. I was Khagan of the Tengri faith, but with me came the Chanyu's younger brother — my grandfather, Qiangqu — my father Yufuluo, and Hozheng's own sons besides. The whole Luandi clan was moving as one, and so we all heard what Hozheng said.

"You have to stare until your eyes water before you can even tell a wall once stood here."

"The Great Wall Liu Che used to boast of has become a smear on the ground, elder brother."

Right Wise King Qiangqu answered his elder brother that way. Liu Che: the personal name of Emperor Wu of Han. Out here on the frontier, with Xiongnu as far as the eye could see, there was no one to take offense if you spoke an emperor's name as if it were any other man's.

Hozheng studied his younger brother's face for a long moment, then looked back at the Guanglu Frontier Wall.

"We are brothers, and still it has been a long time since we spoke like this."

"Forgive me, elder brother. I buried myself in Shuofang and never came out… Even at the Dragon City Grand Sacrifice I never had the words…"

"Looking at the Guanglu Frontier Wall like this, I begin to think your grandson prophesied truly. There will be no victory south of it. We will have to go north and choose our ground there."

"I am still… simply bewildered, elder brother. That grandson of mine suddenly claiming he hears the voice of Tengri — when Yufuluo came tearing in the first time, I thought the boy had lost his—"

"Bewildered?"

Hozheng let out a short, humorless breath of laughter.

"Younger brother. Right Wise King. Can you truly stand there and tell me you are not putting your grandson forward to work a scheme of your own?"

"E-elder brother?"

"I cannot tell whether you only play the simpleton or whether you truly are one. We are both near our old age. Whether you have been acting the fool for decades, or whether…"

"I genuinely do not understand what you are saying."

"I have left the seat of Left Wise King empty."

The moment the title Left Wise King was spoken, I felt every Luandi around us go taut.

"The Xiongnu crown prince. The Left Wise King. At some point this seat stopped going to a son and started going to a younger brother. From elder to younger — that way you can keep enthroning a Chanyu who already has years behind him, which is more stable than raising a child to the throne. That, I suppose, is what our ancestors believed."

Qiangqu's face had gone pale. Sweat was running on him. Father Yufuluo did not dare step in. Huchuquan only looked from his father to his uncle and back again, a little afraid.

"But do it that way, and the men with a claim to Left Wise King multiply without end. You. Your sons. My sons. All of them can say they have the right. And what did that bring us? Do not tell me you do not know our history."

How could anyone not know?

Even before the split into Southern and Northern Xiongnu, the people had already torn themselves into East and West. The civil war of that eastern-western rupture had been worse. East and West was only a polite name for it. In truth it had been a vast internal slaughter in which nine Chanyus stood against one another.

Nine had not existed all at once, of course. Five at the peak, with three more who had been Chanyu before them and then died or surrendered, and Grand Chanyu Huhanye, the final victor, making nine.

Either way. A quarrel over the Xiongnu succession had meant civil war. The original Liu Bao — the one whose body I wore — remembered that well enough. In the history that should have been, the Southern Xiongnu would run from a feud between Liu Bao and Huchuquan into another between Liu Bao and Qubei.

"Do you want the Left Wise King's seat badly enough to go that far?"

"I— I…"

I put my horse alongside my floundering grandfather, Qiangqu.

The Left Wise King problem was the one Liu Bei had once quietly flagged for me. It would have to be settled, sooner or later. But not now. We had no decent pretext for demanding the seat outright beyond the fact that Qiangqu was Hozheng's younger brother, and Hozheng's sons were staring at us from every side. Worse, Qiangqu himself did not have the will for it. Push now, and this gathering could turn into a purge of the entire Right Wise King line — mine included.

It just got a lot harder to say, "If we distinguish ourselves in this war, invest my grandfather as Left Wise King."

Hozheng had chosen this moment, this place, on purpose. A ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Xianbei invasion. The Xiongnu's military strength drawn into one fist. The entire Luandi clan standing within earshot.

I would have to talk us around it.

"Once we leave the Guanglu Frontier Wall, we should turn northwest for Duman City. It is the fortress our ancestor Touman Chanyu raised, and the first capital the Xiongnu are said to have kept. Tengri has said we will take our victory there."

What met us was in even more wretched condition than the Guanglu Frontier Wall or the Great Wall itself — so thoroughly reduced to foundations that calling it a city was an embarrassment. Heaps of earth. That was Duman City, which Touman, father of Grand Chanyu Modu, was said to have built.

A nomad's city was never meant for defense the way a Han fortress was. It was closer to a landmark: a place to gather when the time came to hold the rites, the Dragon City Grand Sacrifice among them.

I had chosen Duman City as our destination for a reason. I had done the arithmetic through the four visions that had come before.

Sure enough, a flare of light drowned my sight.

As expected. The fifth vision.

I saw the face of Grand Chanyu Modu — the same face I had seen in the second vision, the Surrender of the King of Han. The Modu of this vision was younger than that one. No: not younger. A boy just crossing into manhood.

He turned to the men at his back and shouted.

"Until now I have taught you to loose at whatever I mark. When I sent a whistling arrow into my favorite horse, you were to shoot the horse. Every man who did not, I killed."

I felt nothing at all from Modu's riders. No feeling of any kind.

"When I sent a whistling arrow into my favorite concubine, you were to shoot the concubine. Every man who did not, I killed."

Again, not a ripple.

Only then did I understand what he had made of them. He had trained his men into machines that drew and loosed without a question, without a pause.

"When you shoot today's quarry, there will be no hesitation."

Modu and his riders put their horses into a run. They came through a stretch of woods into open ground, and there another troop of cavalry waited. The man at their head was Touman, Modu's father. For a heartbeat he seemed glad to see his son. Then he froze.

Modu and every horse-archer behind him had drawn on him.

Touman and the horse beneath him became a single slab of meat, so thick with shafts it could hardly be told apart, and went down into the grass as if they had been rolled there.

That much was the same as the other visions. But the message that followed was not.