Boiling Point
"Mengde."
Xiahou Dun, who had been silent for some time, finally spoke.
"Aren't you going to tell the Yuan brothers?"
"Brother Benchu, or Gonglu…"
I pricked up my ears, wondering if there was any chance I might actually meet Yuan Shao or Yuan Shu. Cao Cao shook his head almost at once.
"If this reaches Yuan Gonglu's ears, there's no telling what that bastard would do. Better to just let him play around until something actually blows up."
"And Yuan Benchu?"
"Benchu seems to be in contact with He Jin. He might scatter this whole affair right into the heart of the Qingliu just to feed his own ambition. He wants to hide behind He Jin and climb, and play the hero of the Pure Stream while he's at it. Well — I did tell him about He Jin, so let him."
This time I was the one who asked.
"Couldn't Yuan Benchu reach the same conclusion we have, on his own?"
"Xu Ziyuan is at his side, so if he had enough time… but I don't know whether Ziyuan can imagine His Majesty's madness running quite that deep. That's something only a man who's seen it with his own eyes can know."
Cao Cao now named Liu Hong's conduct what it was, without the slightest hesitation: madness.
He turned to Xiahou Dun.
"I'll be attending Father in Luoyang. Yuanrang — send word to Ren and Hong. Those boys should at least be able to raise able-bodied men in Qiao County. Tell them to hold it however they can. If the whole countryside fills up with Taiping Dao and it starts looking too dangerous, tell them to run for Xu Province."
Jia Xu had deliberately taken the lowest seat, and from there he swept his gaze across the men summoned before Dong Zhuo.
Dong Zhuo's younger brother Dong Min sat nearest the lord himself. It looked like fraternal favor, but the man stood shoulder to shoulder with the other generals of Dong Zhuo's army. Beside Jia Xu sat Dong Huang, the son left behind by Dong Zhuo's dead elder brother. The boy was still young, and kinship alone had bought him no special privilege.
After Dong Min came four generals: Guo Si, Li Jue, Zhang Ji, and Fan Chou. All were men of Liang Province — but if you traced them back to their home commanderies, you could read exactly how Dong Zhuo's power had been assembled.
The three names that had once towered over Liang Province — Zhang Huan, Duan Jiong, and Huangfu Gui — had come from Dunhuang Commandery, Wuwei Commandery, and Anding Commandery. Liang Province might have been treated as a backwater, but when the court did reach for a Liangzhou man, it reached for someone from Anding or Hanyang, close to the Sanfu. That Zhang Huan and Duan Jiong had climbed as high as they had, Huangfu Gui aside, was already a staggering rise for men of Liang Province.
Just as Duan Jiong had drawn his kinsman Duan Wei and fellow townsmen like Jia Xu to his side, his success had been, for every man of Wuwei, a door opening onto their own. There had been men of Dunhuang who pinned the same hopes on Zhang Huan. But Zhang Huan had fallen too early to be anyone's strength. After he shut himself away in Hongnong Commandery, the man who swallowed what remained of Zhang Huan's following was Dong Zhuo.
Even as Wuji Colonel of the Western Regions, Dong Zhuo had kept close traffic with the people of Dunhuang, who lived with the Western Regions at their doorstep. He gathered so much strength that Duan Jiong, alarmed, had him stripped of office. After Duan Jiong took his own life and his faction scattered, the ground shifted. Men of Wuwei began to gather under Dong Zhuo as well. Jia Xu himself was proof enough. When he first crossed paths with Zhang Ji — another son of Wuwei — in Dong Zhuo's service, they had stared at each other and blurted the same thing: You too?
The same thing happened after Huangfu Gui's political ruin. His nephew Huangfu Song held the post of Grand Administrator of Beidi, yet he had drawn no following from Beidi or from his ancestral Anding. That Li Jue, a Beidi man, had come to Dong Zhuo instead of to Huangfu Gui said everything that needed saying.
And so Dong Zhuo was gathering the old followings of Zhang Huan, Duan Jiong, and Huangfu Gui into a single hand. Even Guo Si of Zhangye Commandery — a shade off the main current of Liangzhou politics — had come over. Dong Zhuo did not hold all of Liang Province. But if you counted his alliances, it was no exaggeration to say the whole province lay inside his shadow. Take a man like Han Sui, as intimate with the Qiang as Dong Zhuo himself. Fan Chou, a native of Han Sui's home commandery of Jincheng, had been dispatched to Dong Zhuo under the polite fiction of a "recommendation."
Dong Zhuo's own townsmen, Wang Guo and Song Jian, were sending him support of every kind. Niu Fu had gone further still: he had become Dong Zhuo's son-in-law, and now sat planted between the four generals and Dong Huang.
"All of Liang Province has its hopes pinned on us."
Dong Zhuo compressed every interest Jia Xu had just surveyed into a single sentence.
"The days of a Liangzhou fighter being used as Luoyang's knife and then thrown away are over."
A heat of old grudges seemed to shimmer above the heads of the generals, like haze off summer earth. Their circumstances differed, and so did what each man coveted — but their grievance against Luoyang was one thing they shared.
"The days of Liangzhou shedding blood with our Qiang and Di brothers because of Luoyang's greed are over too."
It was not merely pity for the Qiang and the Di, who had been driven to the fork of death or rebellion and had chosen rebellion because they had no other choice. Why should Liangzhou's own people — neighbors yesterday, brothers yesterday — have to bleed for the appetites of those bastards in Luoyang? Dong Zhuo was hurling that question straight at the capital.
"Wenhe."
At Dong Zhuo's summons Jia Xu came forward and bowed.
"That Cao Cao who came to fetch the Xiongnu prince said the Emperor knows what I'm doing."
"He may have been lying to get the prince away. But with the Emperor as he is now, it is just as possible he knows exactly what you are doing, Governor, and has chosen to let it be. As you said yourself — you are a knife that sits well in his hand."
Dong Zhuo gave a short, dry laugh.
"The Xiongnu prince said the same of himself. Claimed he was popular for being a knife that listened."
"I still do not understand why you told that prince it would be good for him to see the Emperor with his own eyes."
"Ah, that. I meant it exactly as I said it. Let him look the Emperor in the face and learn just how greedy the man is — and just how much like dog shit he thinks the provinces are."
Dong Zhuo said it grinning, and the men of Liang Province grinned with him.
"That's not the only reason, though. That Xiongnu boy is a dangerous, ambition-stuffed prodigy. I want him for a grandson-in-law. I've never seen eyes like that on a ten-year-old, Wenhe."
"Neither had I."
"At best, he's the kind of creature who'll pour Bing Province — Lü Bu and all — into Luoyang and set the place on fire. At worst, he'll take a limb or two off the Emperor. We move in step with him. When the Taiping Dao raises hell in Guandong, our Liang Province…"
Dong Zhuo's eyes flashed.
"Find a man named Ma Yuanyi?"
"One of Zhang Jue's disciples. If the Emperor and the Taiping Dao are negotiating, he'll already be in Luoyang."
"And once we find him… we sit him down for a talk of our own?"
"Talking to him matters. But so does protecting him — making sure the Emperor can't just take a whim into his head and have him killed."
"If the Emperor decides someone dies, I die. We all die."
"We can't hide him in a mansion or a country villa, no. But if things go wrong, we can at least tell him to run."
Ma Yuanyi's death is what lights the fuse of the Taiping Dao uprising — the Yellow Turban Rebellion. If I could get him out alive, I might use him as a line to Zhang Jue and put a hand on the timing and the scale of the rising.
Even if the Taiping Dao rebellion succeeded, what followed would unfold far outside anything I or the Southern Xiongnu could control. Even if it failed exactly as it had in history, there would not be many openings afterward for the Southern Xiongnu to matter. The Yellow Turban Rebellion was, from the start, a cataclysm too large for us to steer.
Chaos is an opportunity, they say — but only for the man who already holds some measure of initiative, who can still see the next move. However well you know the history, a rupture on the scale of the Yellow Turbans is the kind of thing you simply have to sit and watch once it breaks.
In any case, Cao Cao had agreed to help me find Ma Yuanyi, cooperating with my "prophecy" in the hope of heading off catastrophe. I was deceiving him, whether I liked it or not — but then, we were using each other anyway. Or perhaps, as Dong Zhuo would have it, we were using each other and groping our way toward a common interest in the process.
We never got as far as finding Ma Yuanyi. Two pieces of bad news found the residence where Cao Cao and I were staying first.
The first was a letter from Cai Yong, who had gone to Yang Province.
There were almost no followers of the Taiping Dao in Yang Province. I took this to mean the Way had never crossed the Yangtze. I was mistaken. The Taiping Dao has already crossed the Yangtze. Twice.
They crossed once, grew their strength through every corner of Yang Province, and not long ago the faithful gathered again, recrossed the river, and went north. When asked where they were bound, they said Ye County in Wei Commandery.
You will want to ask what the officials were doing, that they did not stop the people from leaving. I could not bring myself to press them. This Taiping Dao has already trained the common folk into soldiers; they are an army. Any official who could have stood against a host of that size would deserve praise for his courage. One cannot blame a man for failing to stop what he could not stop.
Yang Province has troops of its own, of course. But those troops are exhausted from putting down the rebellion of the Xu father and son — and some of the soldiers have become Taiping Dao believers themselves.
I hear that from Jing Province, too, a host has already set out for Wei Commandery in Ji Province, bound on the same road.
We can only pray they do not turn bandit on the way to Ji Province. And if that vast multitude reaches Wei Commandery without incident, that will be its own cause for worry.
Cai Yong
Cao Cao finished the letter and was a long time silent before he finally let the words out.
"…The rebellion may as well have already begun."
In the original history, Ma Yuanyi shuttled between Ye and Luoyang preparing the rising, was caught, and died. He had been gathering the faithful summoned from Jing Province and Yang Province at Ye, and making ready.
"It isn't only the Emperor who feels the negotiations going sour."
"So Zhang Jue's side is mustering an army to put pressure on the throne?"
"Whether that army becomes a knife pointed at Luoyang, or a knife Luoyang itself will swing… perhaps they're telling the Emperor to choose."
Cao Cao had not even had time to sink into the problem before the second piece of bad news arrived.
The Emperor had sent a carriage to the residence.
"Uncle…"
That was how Cao Cao addressed the eunuch who stepped down from the carriage. Zhao Zhong — at this moment the only man who stood as Zhang Rang's equal among the palace eunuchs.
Zhao Zhong glanced around with uneasy eyes.
"Mengde. His Majesty… is summoning the Xiongnu prince."
Cao Cao's gaze cut to me. This might be an omen of death, or of something worse than death.
I spoke as if to steady him.
"I'll go. Who knows — I may even be able to persuade His Majesty first."
The eunuch Zhao Zhong said nothing on the way.
The imperial palaces of Luoyang were divided into the Northern Palace and the Southern Palace. The last time I had come, it had been the Southern Palace. This time we were bound for the Northern. The path was not the labyrinth it had been when I last went to see Liu Hong, but we were led deep enough. Even so, the room I was shown into had the warmth of people in it.
It was a chamber where two children in unmistakably precious clothes were at play. A boy about my own age seemed to be keeping his little brother occupied — a child of two or three. Behind the boys sat two women in silence, their faces drawn with worry: one young, one old.
The elder of the two children lifted his head and looked at me. The women turned toward Zhao Zhong.
"I know nothing. I have only brought the child to this room as His Majesty commanded. If you will excuse me…"
Zhao Zhong made his bow and left me there.
Four pairs of eyes settled on me.
"Ah — I am… of the Xiongnu…"
In that instant the eyes of everyone but the smallest child went wide with terror. I thought the name Xiongnu itself had done it. I was wrong.
A hand came down on my shoulder. I must have worn the same face they did.
As you asked of me before, I bestow upon you the surname Liu.
Mother. Empress. Bian. Xie. From this moment on, this child is kin of the imperial house.
Liu Xie was too young to understand his father's words. The other three nodded like machines. Watching their faces as they were forced to welcome a new relative, I thought:
I never wanted to become Liu Bao like this.
