The Western Regions Expert (2)
"How extraordinary. How extraordinary."
Zhang Min murmured the words again, then sank into his seat.
"...Ah. I haven't even offered Fengxian and the Xiongnu prince a place to sit... Forgive this old man. When my wits desert me, I sometimes forget my manners."
Lü Bu and I clasped our hands in formal greeting, then sat before him.
Zhang Min's eyes, heavy with a deep exhaustion, turned toward me.
"I heard tales of you even years ago, when we fought Tanshihuai. But that you were merely a child... Ah, forgive me."
"It's all right. I'm still a child, after all."
"So you are. Seeing such a person with my own eyes, I suppose I must believe what I can scarcely credit."
He muttered something about a prodigy, a divine child, then raised his voice again.
"I've heard rumors that Cai Bojie's young daughter can detect the slightest error in a melody, that she memorizes every book she reads... Perhaps those stories are true as well."
At that name, my heart gave an involuntary leap.
Cai Bojie. Bojie was Cai Yong's courtesy name. And Cai Yong's young daughter... that would be Cai Yan. She would be about six this year. It seemed the rumors of her brilliance had already spread among anyone who trafficked much in Luoyang.
I will have to go and meet her someday.
"The plan to drape Fengxian and his cavalry in red cloth and leather, to cow the enemy and break free — that came from the prince's mind, I hear."
Zhang Min went on.
"And I have heard that the scheme which drove Tanshihuai to his death this time was also of your devising."
Even from his seat in Taiyuan, Zhang Min had clearly been watching the northern situation with a careful eye. Then again, news of Tanshihuai and the Xianbei — the great stain upon his life's record — would have reached him whether he listened for it or not.
"To say I drove Tanshihuai to his death is an exaggeration. I failed to capture him. He died of illness."
"But he died broken by defeat, I am sure. I know the pain of losing a war all too well."
So the last war had been agony for him, after all.
"Earlier I offered my thanks only to Fengxian. This time I wish to convey my gratitude to the Xiongnu prince as well."
It always felt strange — and faintly ticklish — that something I had done purely for my own gain should earn another man's gratitude.
"...But tell me. Why has the Xiongnu prince come all the way to Taiyuan, and brought Fengxian with him?"
"I will neither speak in circles nor conceal anything from Your Excellency the Grand Administrator. I have come because I need your help."
"And what help can I possibly offer you?"
"I have heard that when Your Excellency served as General of the Household Protecting the Xiongnu, you devoted great effort to understanding the Hu — the Xiongnu among them. I have recently won a modest merit and opened land north of the Great Wall. However..."
"Holding it has proven no easy matter. Am I right?"
Before I could finish, Zhang Min had already struck the heart of it. I nodded.
"You are."
"Land has always been easier to seize than to hold. To become its true master takes as much labor as leveling mountains and filling in ponds. And for a young Xiongnu prince, the difficulty is all the greater."
"Your words are just."
"The harshness of the land north of the Great Wall was, from the beginning, something even the Xiongnu at their height could scarcely endure. In the distant past, when the Xiongnu pressed the Han with hundreds of thousands of cavalry, their Chanyu still demanded tribute from the Han. Do you understand what that means?"
I knew. I knew it in my bones.
"It means that however mighty their armies, they were always short of goods."
"Exactly so. While their armies were strong, the Xiongnu Chanyu could bully the Han into handing over supplies. When the tribute was cut off, they raided the frontier to make up the shortfall. But even that had its limits."
"Once the Han conquered the Western Regions and sealed the Xiongnu's eastern trade routes, even they could no longer sustain a powerful army."
Zhang Min listened, sank into thought, then shook his head. ...Why?
"What the prince says is one reason the Xiongnu declined. But the fundamental problem lies elsewhere."
Before I could cry out for his teaching, Zhang Min raised a hand and stopped me.
"It is true that the prince's schemes killed Tanshihuai and thereby settled a private grudge of mine. But if I, to repay a private kindness, were to offer counsel that would make the Xiongnu strong again... I fear I would be committing a crime against the state."
A Xiongnu and a Han man could become close in private. I and Lü Bu. Lü Bu and Yufuluo. Huchuquan and Zhang Liao. But the moment the matter crossed into public business between the Xiongnu and the Han, the story changed. This was an age that praised as virtue the suppression of private friendship in favor of public duty.
In short, if I wanted Zhang Min's advice, I would have to persuade him that giving it would serve the Han as well.
"Let us suppose the Xiongnu under the prince's rule grow strong, conquer the Xianbei now that Tanshihuai is gone, and unify Mobei. Can you then guarantee that those Xiongnu will not harass the Han as they once did? Can you swear they will not simply take the Xianbei's place as the power that plagues us?"
Zhang Min's gaze drifted toward the shelves that filled most of his chamber. Those shelves were packed with rolled wooden slips and bamboo strips.
"I have not merely read the histories. I pride myself on having gathered, without omission, the testimonies of those who fled the Xiongnu to the Han, and of those who returned after living as their captives. If all those records point to a single conclusion, it is this: should the Xiongnu become masters of Mobei once more, they would be bound to seize back the territory they now hold in Monan."
"...Just as Grand Chanyu Huhanye of the Eastern Xiongnu did, when he returned to Mobei."
Grand Chanyu Huhanye had gone back to Mobei with Han aid. But he had been unable to keep the Monan lands where he had briefly sojourned. History itself testified to how powerful the Xiongnu became when they held both Monan and Mobei together.
"I know perfectly well how foolish it is to ask anyone simply to trust the Xiongnu."
The Southern Xiongnu of the present had fallen to the status of Han vassals, and were at times oppressed for it — but I could not deny that the Xiongnu before that fall had been invaders. The Eastern Xiongnu had submitted to the Emperor, returned to Mobei, and then, in the age when the traitor Wang Mang destroyed the Former Han, bared their teeth at the Central Plains once more.
I myself, intending to exploit the coming chaos of the Three Kingdoms, was preparing — however much circumstance had forced my hand — to become an invader in my turn.
But I had to persuade him. Even if it meant a manipulation that stopped just short of an outright lie.
I was not the original Xiongnu Liu Bao, not entirely. Yet ten years of living in this Three Kingdoms world had built a Xiongnu identity inside me. Even without the monkey demon's threats, a desire to live for the Xiongnu had taken root in my heart. And the moment I heard Cai Yan's name, some old, stubborn obsession had stirred awake again.
I had to take the next step here.
"I have taken Lü Fengxian as my master."
"So I have heard. I thought it a most unusual thing, that he should take a Xiongnu prince as his disciple."
"My master's ideal is a world in which the Hu and the Han live side by side."
This time I pressed on before either Lü Bu or Zhang Min could speak.
"While Han and Xiongnu live together, there will be no shortage of quarrels. But such quarrels are common enough among Han people themselves, and they will become equally common between Han and Xiongnu. I mean to make the small fights ordinary, so that the great ones never come."
If I was ever to rule northern China, I would have to draw on the multi-ethnic systems of the original history. A Hu-Han governing structure would be one of them. And to make full use of Mobei's strength, I would have to settle farmers on any land that could become fields or cities, just as the great Chanyus of old had done. In the end, we would have no choice but to live mixed together. This was not a matter of preference.
"Does what I hold in my heart sound the same to you as the ambitions of the old Chanyus?"
"You are saying the Xiongnu under your rule will be different from those who came before?"
"Yes. I wish to fulfill my master's ideal. As someone who stands close to that ideal, I must think through the concrete means of coexistence. What would you say to a man with that vision ruling the Xiongnu?"
Zhang Min's pupils wavered.
The more bitterly a man has tasted the cruelty of the real world, the more fiercely a thirst for the ideal writhes inside him. The man who cries that ideals cannot overcome reality is the man who has hunted harder than anyone for a path that leads to them. He may not know how to reach the ideal — but he knows, intimately, every way reality can break a man.
And if, to such a man, someone appears who offers another road toward that same ideal?
I met Zhang Min's gaze and did not look away. He held my eyes, and let out a faint sigh.
"If Han and Hu can live together across both Monan and Mobei, would that not resolve a great part of the military expenditure that so plagues the Han?"
Military crisis. That was what even the Qingliu could not use to deny the Emperor's supremacy outright. The Emperor's and the metropolitan offices' exploitation of the provinces could always be justified the moment someone uttered the words crisis on the frontier. If that problem could be solved, was it not a proposal of genuine allure to a Confucian scholar?
And if Zhang Min was, at his root, a Confucian scholar...
"...Trade is not a matter of one side buying alone, or one side selling alone. Only when buying and selling are both in place does it become trade."
It had worked. Zhang Min's counsel came pouring out.
"The tribute the Xiongnu received from the Han was used within the Xiongnu themselves — but what remained was used for trade."
"And if the Han refused to send tribute to the Xiongnu..."
"Then the tribute the Xiongnu needed for trade vanished as well."
I see. The Xiongnu had their own specialties — horses, weapons of every kind, metalwork — but those alone could never have sustained the Silk Road. Farther west, in Persia and in the Mediterranean world beyond it, goods still stranger and more abundant were being produced. To draw merchants carrying such wares all the way east, this side had to put something of equal worth on the table.
"What merchant would bother seeking out a Chanyu's court that had nothing particularly attractive to offer?"
And so the Xiongnu had solved the problem of trade goods with the tribute they received from the Han. Once the Han went to war and the tribute stopped, it did not matter how firmly the Xiongnu gripped the Silk Road. The merchants simply would not come.
The traders of that vast network — stretching from Kangju, Dayuan, and the Greater Yuezhi of Central Asia, through their heirs the Kushans, all the way west to Anxi, the Arsacid dynasty of Parthia — were men who chased profit, not adventurers. If the Xiongnu could not produce what they sought, and the Han was waving those same goods from Chang'an, of course they would shift their route.
Even now, I had heard, Persian gold coins sometimes circulated through the Hexi Four Commanderies.
"The prince's circumstances are far better than those of that earlier age. The western reaches of Bingzhou, where the Southern Xiongnu are settled, connect southward to Chang'an, so Han goods will be easy to obtain. And now those goods can be carried north through the Guanglu Frontier Wall as well. ...In this last war, how far did you extend your territory to the west?"
"Not as far as Mount Junji."
"It would be well if you could push on to Mount Tianyan and Mount Zhuoye. But if that proves impossible, you must open a road at least as far as the Juyan Marsh in Zhangye Commandery, or the Xiuzhe Marsh in Wuwei Commandery."
"You mean I should make the merchants decide it is more convenient to come to my cities than to Chang'an or Luoyang."
"Guanzhong and Longshang are in turmoil from the Qiang rebellion. If you can induce the merchants of the Western Regions and beyond to take another road in search of the goods of Chang'an and Luoyang, the profit will be immense."
"But as Your Excellency well knows, the road from the land I hold to the Juyan Marsh or the Xiuzhe Marsh is far too harsh."
Look at a map of the Han and the northwest takes on a very peculiar shape. Even along that northwestern frontier, the western side bends the way it does because of the Tibetan Plateau — yet the eastern side juts out in strange, abrupt protrusions. That is because of a desert, the southwestern fringe of the Gobi, later to be called the Badain Jaran — the desert known as You Sha, the Flowing Sands. Great lakes — the Juyan Marsh and the Xiuzhe Marsh — sit in the heart of that desert, and the Han's northwestern commanderies were founded around those lakes, which is why the border juts out in that odd fashion.
How was anyone supposed to overcome a desert so formidable that it had bent the very shape of the frontier?
Zhang Min gave a short answer.
"I have heard that when Tanshihuai raided Beidi Commandery and Jiuquan Commandery, he used camels."