The Grand Tutor (3)
Emperor Ling did not know the Yellow Turbans the way I did — not from the far side of a rebellion already written into history. But he understood well enough how formidable their following had become.
Memorials warning of the Taiping Dao's swelling influence had been arriving in Luoyang for more than a decade. Rather than suppress the sect, however, Emperor Ling had conceived a plan to use them.
That plan now stood on the brink of collapse.
If he yielded to the Qingliu counteroffensive and moved to sweep the Taiping Dao aside, the Yellow Turban Rebellion would become inevitable. Every ounce of strength he had poured into the sect would turn, all at once, against the Han itself. The result would be slaughter and displacement on a scale almost beyond imagining — and those refugees would simply vanish into the households of the Qingliu gentry, swelling the great clans' power still further.
There is a saying that the Black Mountain Bandits numbered a million. It does not mean they fielded a million-strong army. It means that after the Yellow Turban Rebellion, the refugees who became one of its successor forces — the Black Mountain Bandits — reached a million souls. A million, for that one band alone. Cao Cao absorbed a million men and women and forged three hundred thousand of them into his Qingzhou troops.
In other words, after the rebellion, the common people who slipped entirely beyond the court's control — vanishing under gentry houses, warlords, and bandit chiefs — numbered in the hundreds of thousands, even millions, for each faction. From the twilight of the Eastern Han through the Three Kingdoms, the vanishing of forty million from a population of fifty million must have unfolded exactly like this.
Liang, Bing, and Youzhou were already consumed with watching the northern frontier. Yizhou had the Di and the Qiang to contend with, along with the many peoples of Ba and Nanzhong. Jingzhou, save for the Nanyang region, was a nest of Man-Yi tribes. Yangzhou strained merely to keep the Shanyue in check. Jiaozhou had only just put down a Nanyue revolt.
If the Yellow Turban Rebellion then tore Jizhou, Qingzhou, Yanzhou, and Yuzhou away, nothing would remain but Sili. And even within Sili, the west would writhe under Qiang rebellions alongside Liang Province, while the north would take the full weight of the Yellow Turbans.
What of Xuzhou, one might ask? The Yellow Turban Rebellion was precisely the moment Xuzhou's gentry warlords — men like Zang Ba — rose to power. Xuzhou, too, would simply fall away.
The dismantling of the Han. Its collapse. Its extinction.
Emperor Ling was laying that future on the table before Zhang Jue.
Emperor Ling suddenly lifted a finger and pointed at me. Only then did Zhang Jue's gaze follow.
"Do you know why We keep that Hu child close — why We even granted him the Liu surname? In part because he is clever enough to have arranged this very meeting. But also because the instant We turn Our back on him, the Great Han gains one more worry along its borders."
So that was how he saw it.
And coldly considered, he was not wrong. Before I reincarnated, a meme used to circulate among Three Kingdoms enthusiasts: Goguryeo, that weak little kingdom Guanqiu Jian steamrolled. But put yourself seriously in the position of the man responsible for the Han's northeastern frontier. No sane official would shrug and say, Heh, it's only puny Goguryeo — leave it be. This was a state that, given the chance, had conquered everything from Daifang to Liaodong. Guanqiu Jian's campaign itself began as a counterstrike against Goguryeo's own invasion.
However paltry a foreign power's strength might look beside the Han's, a threat is still a threat. The same was true of me, and of the Southern Xiongnu.
Emperor Ling's hand pointed north this time.
"Fortunately Tanshihuai is dead, and the Xianbei are too busy tearing one another apart to look south. But what do you suppose happens if they put their own house in order before the Great Han can put its affairs to rest?"
Kebineng would not grow into a colossal northern threat for another forty or fifty years, but Emperor Ling knew nothing of that future. He was the emperor. It was his business to assume that a second Tanshihuai, or a third, might appear at any moment.
"The Taiping Dao, the Great Han, the Zhuoliu, the Qingliu — all of it. Swept away. Every last scrap. Would it not?"
Emperor Ling lowered his hand and rested it on the table.
"Taxes, corvée, conscription — however crushing they may be, once the frame of the Great Han itself shatters, you will not even have the luxury of complaining that they were harsh."
"So that is why you said we should all burn together and perish, Your Majesty?"
"If the Great Worthy Teacher will not meet Us halfway, We have no path left but the ruin We cannot escape. And then—"
Emperor Ling's gaze drifted toward his son, Liu Bian.
"You will kill Us and Our eldest. Our second son, waiting in Luoyang, will become emperor. The men who enthrone that child will wipe you out — and the Han falls all the same. If you topple that child's Luoyang court instead, you will find yourselves doing exactly the work We have been doing all this time."
He smiled, the way a man smiles when he means try it — or let's see how well you manage.
Zhang Jue was silent for a long time.
Emperor Ling's point was sound. Even the Taiping Dao's ideals could only be dreamed within the frame of a Han that still stood. He had seen the people starve, sicken, and die. He had seen them dragged to war and worked to death on the empire's endless corvée. That was why he could not speak as the Confucian scholars spoke. He could not say, as they did, that if one simply civilized the Hu with virtue, the cost of defense would shrink of its own accord.
"...If we were to lend the emperor our strength," Zhang Jue said at last, "I would need to hear what you intend once the fighting is done."
While Emperor Ling and Zhang Jue took a brief rest, Cao Cao stepped outside for air.
A man who looked to be about forty approached him. He did not quite match the other Taiping Dao adherents here. He wore no yellow headscarf. His name was Hua Tuo, though Cao Cao did not know it, and Hua Tuo had no intention of offering it.
He posed his question as if speaking to himself.
"Do you believe the emperor and the Great Worthy Teacher will reach a compromise?"
Cao Cao regarded him for a moment, then answered.
"If they do not, do you imagine those of us who have walked into the tiger's den will walk back out unharmed? We will die. So the question is not whether a compromise will be reached. It is whether we ought to be praying that one is."
He had no wish to quarrel with a man of the Taiping Dao, and so he answered just enough not to ignore the question.
Hua Tuo's questions continued.
"Then let us say they do reach a compromise. The emperor uses the Taiping Dao as his army. The Great Worthy Teacher becomes Grand Tutor of the court. Will that be a good thing for this country?"
"War is war. Rebellion will erupt not only from those four kings but from the Qingliu as well, and a great many people will die or be maimed putting it down. Still... it will be better than fighting the Taiping Dao. A gentry clan's private soldiers will accept their master's fall and their own absorption into the Taiping Dao readily enough. The people of the Taiping Dao, though — they would rather fight than go under a gentry house, would they not?"
"So you are saying it is damage this country can bear?"
"Yes. Once the damage is repaired, new politics can be considered after that."
"Kaa-haht!"
Cao Cao's brow furrowed. It was not the strangeness of the laugh itself. It was the mockery laid bare inside that strangeness.
"You still believe this country has hope, I see."
He said it the way a man teases a naive young master.
"I have studied a little medicine. I give the patient a special drug so he feels no pain, then I open the afflicted place myself and take out the cause of the illness."
Cao Cao tilted his head. He thought he had heard, vaguely, of such a physician.
Hua Tuo went on.
"The illness of the Central Plains must be treated the same way."
"You mean we must cut the belly open?"
"Your method, and the emperor's, is nothing but administering a fine medicine! It cannot cut out the root of the disease!"
"And what do you take the root of the disease to be?"
"The Liu imperial house itself."
Cao Cao closed his mouth. Partly because Hua Tuo's words were dangerously close to treason. Partly because he already sensed the conversation would run on parallel tracks and never meet.
"A single household rose and became a nation. The Liu house believes that because they grew strong and became the Han, they themselves are the Han. That is why they call it the House of Han whether they mean the country or the clan!"
Hua Tuo's forefinger stabbed toward Cao Cao.
"What good is it if the emperor becomes a follower of the Taiping Dao and serves the Great Worthy Teacher as a disciple? He still believes that he is the country. He may have offered the Great Worthy Teacher some plausible reforms in there, but unless he abandons the idea that the imperial house is the nation, the same sickness will keep breaking out!"
Cao Cao decided to hear Hua Tuo out, and see how far the man would go.
"Crush the Taiping Dao and national strength hits bottom, so the dynasty falls? No, no. Sweep the Taiping Dao away and of course the Liu house does not change — that is why it falls. And if you join hands with the Taiping Dao and pile up a million Qingliu heads, the dynasty still falls unless the Liu house itself changes."
"I find that difficult to follow. The emperor is the master of the country. The lord of men. If that understanding must change, what would you set as the pillar of All Under Heaven?"
Cao Cao flinched slightly at the cry, which was nearly a shriek.
All Under Heaven belonging not to the emperor, not to the Liu house... but to everyone.
Yet before he could even absorb the force of the words, Cao Cao shook his head hard and threw them off.
"Some things do not change. Even among what does not change, one can still find a plan for All Under Heaven. One can still find hope. I will take those words of yours as unheard."
"Kaa-haht!" Hua Tuo burst out laughing again.
"I do wonder how long you will carry that hope, Cao Mengde."
Dong Zhuo regarded the strapping young man and the Hu boy who had come before him.
Jia Xu murmured at his side.
"The young man's name is Xiahou Dun. A kinsman of Cao Cao. They say he killed a man who insulted his teacher when he was fourteen."
"...I like that. I like that a great deal."
"The boy is called Huchuquan. He is the uncle of Luanti Bao — or rather, the one they now call Liu Bao. Uncle to the Xiongnu khagan."
"Not much of an age gap there. Liu Bao's grandfather must've been quite the stallion."
Dong Zhuo started to chuckle, a low rumble that took its time dying. Jia Xu waited for it to settle before he spoke again.
"If Liu Bao refuses the marriage talk outright, what of this one?"
"Use the uncle in Liu Bao's place and reach into the Xiongnu that way?"
"Yes."
"No."
Dong Zhuo cut him off flat.
"That boy Huchuquan came as an errand-runner. High birth or not, older or not, it means he sits in his nephew's palm. And there aren't many Xiongnu who can read the Han's political weather the way Liu Bao does. A man with that kind of eye is the only one fit to be this Dong Zhongying's grandson-in-law."
He waved Jia Xu back a step and smiled at Huchuquan and Xiahou Dun.
"Well then. What does the Xiongnu khagan have to say to me? Something about trade?"
Huchuquan folded his hands in the Han manner and made his bow.
"The Xiongnu khagan hopes Your Excellency will drive your army to Ye County, in Wei Commandery."
"A request for reinforcements, then."
"If you require a price, he said he wishes to proceed with the previous marriage discussion."