BST - Chapter 5
Chapter 5: I Want to Borrow the Imperial Uncle's Head
"Where lives are at stake, whether one believes it or not, the danger must be strangled in its cradle."
Tuoba Gui waved his hand, the resolve in his eyes plain for all to see.
The attendants dared not hesitate a moment longer; on their way to summon the others, they all but broke into a run.
In the ten years this King of Wei had held power, he had slain without number and won the highest renown. The shadow of Yan's former intimidation had been wiped clean from Wei's brow.
There was no doubt: once Murong Bao's remnants were crushed, Tuoba Gui would have the chance to take the step from king to emperor.
Never mind merely bringing two princes before him and perhaps putting them to death ahead of time. After all, years ago he had sent his own brother abroad as an envoy; the enemy detained him, the Empress Dowager worried over her son's fate until she sickened and died of grief, which amounted to driving his own mother to her death, and not a soul had dared murmur a word about it.
Cui Hong was a surrendered minister to begin with, kept here only because Wei intended to draw up its own institutions and statutes. There was even less to be said about him.
The two consorts traveling with the court and their sons were brought before the throne with all speed.
Five-year-old Tuoba Si was led by the hand by his mother, and the richly gowned woman beside him walked with a light step and a lively air. She was none other than Lady Liu, who ruled the inner palace.
Before Tuoba Gui could speak, she boldly stepped forward to meet him. "Surely Your Majesty does not truly believe what the Heavenly Screen says? Xiao Si may be young, but already he shows himself a filial child. He will only serve Your Majesty as my elder brother does, campaigning east and south. How could he ever do anything against Your Majesty's interests?"
Tuoba Gui was sharp-eyed; how could he fail to see that beneath Lady Liu's bright smile, the hand holding Tuoba Si gripped far harder than usual?
Her temples, too, were a little damp, and not merely from the hurry of the journey.
She was afraid, yet dared not show it.
Tuoba Gui put an arm around her shoulders and looked down at his eldest son. "If he had half your courage, I might well believe he would dare lay hands on his own father one day."
At that Lady Liu broke into a smile and pushed at his chest. "You were the one who said he should study more Confucian classics when he began learning his characters. How can you blame him for that?"
Tuoba Gui neither agreed nor denied it. His gaze had already shifted from his eldest son to the other mother and son at a distance.
Lady He, standing with her arms at her sides, had bowed to him in silence and said nothing more.
Yet even without a word, she was beautiful as a lotus in full bloom, and with that cold expression she seemed a flowering branch dusted with a thin layer of frost at dawn.
Even today Tuoba Gui felt no regret that, over his mother's objections, he had killed Lady He's husband and carried her off to his own tent.
"What do you make of that line on the Heavenly Screen?"
Lady He slowly raised her eyes, her expression neither sorrowful nor glad. "If I were you, I would certainly do two things."
This, too, seemed an answer Tuoba Gui had not expected. "Let's hear them."
Lady He replied: "Kill me and young Shao, and announce that I bore a grudge against the King for driving my sister to her death and breaking up the Helan tribe; that before Shao was even three I had already filled his head with thoughts of revenge, and that Your Majesty, having discovered it, could only put us both to death."
"The other: have Lady Liu cast a golden figure once more, and if she succeeds, make her Queen at once and designate Tuoba Si as heir apparent. The King is a man who aspires to rule all under heaven, and your achievements are already known throughout the realm by way of the Heavenly Screen. You must not be left without an heir. Please think it over."
The smile froze on Lady Liu's face.
Nothing in the world had prepared her to hear such words from Lady He.
Lady He was not only Tuoba Gui's consort but also his maternal aunt. When she spoke of resenting her sister's death, she meant the Empress Dowager, dead less than a year ago.
That excuse would truly hold.
If Tuoba Gui did as she said, killing Lady He and Tuoba Shao first and then raising Lady Liu and Tuoba Si, he could at once clear himself of the Heavenly Screen's death sentence while still keeping his eldest son as heir.
The Helan had long been beaten into submission. Apart from the handful who had gone over to Yan, the rest dared no thought of rebellion, and even killing Lady He and Tuoba Shao would not change their stance.
It was the best solution available.
But it also meant she had laid the knife that would kill her straight into Tuoba Gui's hand.
Tuoba Gui let go of Lady Liu's shoulder and strode up to Lady He. Even at close quarters, meeting her eyes, her gaze remained unbelievably calm.
After a moment of silence, Tuoba Gui said, "What a pity. You are not me."
Lady He had no need to guess what he would do.
He raised his hand and gave an order. "Send both consorts and the princes back."
This "send back" surely meant control and surveillance to follow, but it was enough to bring wild joy and sheer relief flashing through Lady Liu's eyes.
She took Tuoba Si by the hand and walked out step by step, her heart full of gratitude toward Lady He.
Without that answer, which had put her own life on the line, no one could know what decision Tuoba Gui would ultimately have made.
Even now, as she was already walking out, she still felt a sharp gaze resting on the hand with which she held Tuoba Si.
From where Cui Hong stood, one could see it more clearly.
Into Tuoba Gui's habitually harsh expression was mixed a thread of indescribable longing.
If Cui Hong remembered rightly, Tuoba Gui had spent his childhood dependent on others under his mother's protection, escaped only under her cover, and risen by way of his maternal kin's power.
Yet such support and tenderness had no place whatever in the contest to unite the tribes.
Kin and mother alike were things he could sacrifice at any time. For he would never permit himself to be bound hand and foot by anything, never allow himself one weakness more.
Such an extreme way of doing things might truly, as the Heavenly Screen said, one day turn and bite him.
But now he merely issued another order. "Execute the Murong captives, including... Lady Murong."
Lady He's steps faltered, and only then did she go on walking.
Some months ago, seizing on Murong Chui's death from illness, Tuoba Gui had launched a counterattack, retaken Pingcheng, and captured many of the Murong clan, among them Murong Bao's daughter.
Tuoba Gui had taken her into his harem.
Today she had risked death to carve out a way to survive, yet she had still failed to stop Tuoba Gui from raising the butcher's blade. He had to justify it to himself.
She did not even dare guess how long today's reprieve would last.
"Mother, why are you crying..."
Lady He hurriedly held back her tears, quickly wiped her face twice with a sleeve, and, feigning composure, answered the son in her arms. "No. This is not the time for tears."
The bewildered child could not begin to understand what she felt.
Now that she need not face Tuoba Gui, the composure she had worn was crumbling all over again.
"Your father, the King, is cruel and unfeeling. You and I have little chance of surviving; we must find a way to escape."
The Heavenly Screen said that in the south there would arise an Emperor Yong'an, who after Tuoba Gui's death would march north and sweep the Central Plains clean. Perhaps her way out lay in the south.
But where would the chance to flee come from?
[If we loosen the definition of overlord a little further, the north in this period held several other promising candidates.]
[One, for instance, took up his father's unfinished work. First he concealed the death and confused the enemy's judgment; then, as General-in-Chief, he launched a counterattack, and from among the Qiang he chose a general skilled in war to hold Shangbang, preparing to seize Longxi.]
[Another: back when Tuoba Gui slaughtered the Xiongnu Tiefu tribe, he overlooked a young child. That child later had the chance, by his own looks, to become the son-in-law of a great general of a rival state, and from there to soar, raising troops and founding a state after killing his own father-in-law.]
[Of course, all of this lies ahead, and we will not dwell on it here.]
[Beyond doubt, the Xiongnu, the Qiang, the Xianbei, and the Di all prized martial prowess, and in this phase one military prodigy after another emerged. These men were long past being content to raid the Central Plains and then go back to wandering after pasture and water. They sought instead to draw from the culture of the Central Plains the strength to take root there, and to turn their states into real states.]
[That makes the power struggles of the south all the more absurd at this juncture! And the Eastern Jin fashion for pure talk, typified by the scholars of Yonghe, is especially out of keeping with the times.]
[Before dawn: perhaps that describes not only Emperor Yong'an's position at the time, but also the situation faced by the state under Han rule.]
[Whether dawn can break, whether night can turn to day, is a question of the utmost weight.]
[And that brings us to our second section.]
Across the scroll of Jiankang depicted on the Heavenly Screen, a new line of title appeared.
[The Time of Checks and Balances].
[As everyone knows, Emperor Yong'an's own ability to lead troops in battle was only average for that era. Not that this was any small thing, but it genuinely did not merit the title of famous general, and compared with General Liu, who was loyal to the Emperor, it fell well short.]
[But when it comes to governing, coordinating the rear, tending to the people's livelihood, and deciding national strategy, look at this performance. Not merely surviving amid the balance of power, but hacking out a path of blood. Hmm... without exaggerating, if you added together all the rulers of that age who called themselves king or emperor, Yong'an would still thrash them all.]
[At this point Emperor Yong'an had not yet truly taken the seat of power, yet had already proved the point.]
[How to break free of the encirclement of the great families and imperial power; how to use the balance between religion and the throne to set new rules; how to marshal a force of one's own; and how to face the many crises pressing close at hand: in every case Emperor Yong'an produced a textbook answer.]
[Three near-fatal crises did not cut Emperor Yong'an's campaign short; instead, each offered a chance to turn the tables and bring former opponents to heel, until Yong'an had secured a position just beneath one person and above all others, free at last to act on a grand scale.]
[The maneuvering of this stretch of history is far more splendid than a son-in-law killing his father-in-law, or a son killing his father, in the same period.]
[Let us set aside for the moment certain rumors of romantic entanglement, and analyze this stretch of history with a purely political eye.]
[To... avoid anyone saying again... that I'm an unthinking shill for the Emperor, I...]
[Wang Shen'ai was listening with all her attention when the Heavenly Screen, for all the world like a lost signal, flashed with a burst of static, the video image breaking up and stalling again and again.]
Then, far from recovering, the image simply vanished for good.
The Heavenly Screen unfurled in the sky, though, had not yet faded entirely; a stretch of empty black had taken the place where the colored video had been.
...!
Had she not needed to keep up the bearing of a Crown Princess, lest anyone discover she was no longer the true owner of this body, Wang Shen'ai would have leapt to her feet at this sudden shock.
Hey!
What is this!
That analysis video had stopped before it ever said who exactly this Emperor Yong'an was, and there was no telling when the long scroll of cloud hanging empty in the sky would light up again.
How can it just start and then leave us hanging!
But after a moment of astonishment, Wang Shen'ai reconsidered, and thought this intermission... might be just as well.
For everyone involved.
The Heavenly Screen had appeared in the night and forced everyone awake, which was painful enough in itself. Now that it was gone, the flood of news that had come pouring in still refreshed the mind like a stimulant, yet drowsiness came in waves nonetheless, heavy on the eyelids.
All sides needed time to digest what they had learned.
Take, for example:
If the Heavenly Screen was visible not only to the people of Jiankang but to everyone in the realm, Tuoba Gui in the north would be bound to root out the dangers facing him.
She recalled that Tuoba Gui, founder of Northern Wei, had proposed a measure that seemed to borrow from Emperor Wu of Han but was in fact even more unreasonable, called "when the son is honored, the mother dies."
As the name implied: to make a crown prince, first kill the prince's mother, so as to prevent her clan from meddling in government.
Yet this single decree not only got Tuoba Gui himself assassinated by his own son; it also produced all manner of consequences for the several generations of Northern Wei that followed.
Most of them were anything but positive.
For the moment he surely would not think the trouble lay with this law, not yet established; but he would certainly react to the Heavenly Screen's prophecy.
Though it also meant the southern dynasty would face an even more formidable opponent than before.
Then there was the son-in-law the Heavenly Screen had mentioned, who would kill his father-in-law. However hard Wang Shen'ai racked her brains, she could not work out how old he was now, or whether he had already been picked out and wed. In any case, he was certainly the one most at risk of all those mentioned.
Whether he could make good his escape overnight would be up to him.
And then there was...
The sky had barely lightened when Wang Xun, who had dozed in his clothes before Sima Yao's mourning hall for little more than an hour, was gently shaken awake by an attendant to tell him someone had come looking for him.
The invitation came from none other than Sima Daozi.
Thinking of the arrangements he had made before closing his eyes, Wang Xun rubbed his eyes, made a show of warily sizing up the palace servant who had come, and asked where the meeting would take place.
After a brief tug of war, he succeeded in settling on a palace chamber not far from here, with neither side allowed to bring more than ten guards.
Sima Daozi plainly harbored no suspicion of him.
With the Empress Dowager holding the palace, into which he had long since reached his hand, it was a place of the utmost safety. There was nothing to fear.
The Wang Clan of Langya, too, were future partners; all that remained was a formal negotiation.
Wang Xun had not waited long in the hall when he heard Sima Daozi's voice drawing near. "Why must you be so on your guard against me, Yuanlin, that even meeting requires such precautions?"
He strode into the hall. Short of being blind, Wang Xun could see at once that Sima Daozi had not rested a single moment. Only the desperate drive to survive kept him forcing himself alert.
Wang Xun clasped his hands in salute. "Forgive my bluntness, but it seems to me the Prince of Kuaiji had best make himself scarce."
The smile Sima Daozi had labored to maintain went stiff; then, remembering today's purpose, he smoothed his face again. "What a thing to say. Are you truly willing to have the Heavenly Screen pronounce the verdict on whether you live or die?"
Wang Xun did not answer. He merely sighed softly.
That one sigh seemed to work better than any words.
Sima Daozi's composure cracked at once. "Don't tell me you are willing to wait for this Emperor Yong'an to appear, and lead the Wang Clan of Langya to throw themselves at his feet! Even then there is no guarantee of a good end. Why not walk the same road as me and fight for a future!"
"Before the Heavenly Screen went dark it said so itself: before this Emperor Yong'an truly held the reins of Jin, he too suffered three life-and-death perils. We still have every hope of rooting him out, rather than waiting until he has me torn apart at the wheel and more than half your Wang Clan of Langya put to the sword."
This was their chance.
The Heavenly Screen had told them the future; why could it not be changed?
He pressed another step toward Wang Xun, his voice ever more hurried. "I'll hide nothing from you! An hour ago I issued several orders. Besides sending the two commandery governors with troops to come to my aid, I have had men ride at all speed for Pengcheng, to do away with Liu Laozhi, dismissed from office and sitting at home!"
Wang Xun frowned. "You think Emperor Yong'an's General Liu is the same Liu Laozhi who once served in the Beifu Army?"
"Whether he is or not, killing him first can hardly be wrong." Sima Daozi's eyes were threaded with red, whether from the sleepless night or from frenzy it was impossible to say. "If only I had men enough at hand, the one I should really kill is Huan Xuan!"
Huan Wen's son, Huan Xuan.
"What sort of man, on becoming emperor, would find himself besieged by the great families and imperial power? There is no second possibility besides the Huans, who rose on military merit."
"Huan Wen deposed and set up emperors in his day; had Xie An and the others not worked to hold the line, he would very nearly have deposed the emperor and taken the throne himself. Now his youngest son Huan Xuan is growing into manhood and making his mark. Why should it be impossible that he means to realize his father's lifelong wish?"
Having ruled out the suspects one by one, this was the only conclusion he could reach.
And only Huan Wen's son would be mad enough to move even against the Wang Clan of Langya.
If conditions permitted, he would kill Huan Xuan first.
Wang Xun looked thoughtful. "That reasoning of yours... does have something to it."
Sima Daozi ground his teeth. "It is not merely sound. It is..."
"But I'm sorry. I cannot accept your alliance." Wang Xun cut him off without warning.
Sima Daozi's face changed abruptly.
Not because of Wang Xun's refusal, but because, at the very moment Wang Xun spoke, a burst of screaming came from outside the hall, from a voice he knew well enough.
The next instant the hall's closed doors were kicked open.
Before Sima Daozi could draw the sword at his waist and take Wang Xun hostage, a crowd of archers and crossbowmen had their weapons trained on his head.
He did not need to ask to know that the guards and watchers he had left outside had, in that single instant of upheaval, most likely not one of them survived.
He himself, at this moment, had become the quarry in the cage.
What surprised him more was the person standing behind the crossbowmen.
Sima Daozi shouted harshly. "What is the meaning of this, Crown Princess?"
Wang Shen'ai came to a slow stop several zhang from Sima Daozi, behind the front rank of crossbowmen.
The faint light of dawn from outside the hall shone in behind her, tracing her silhouette and wrapping her face in a halo of backlight, so that no one could make out her expression.
All that came was her unhurried voice. "I thought that with these moves of yours, Imperial Uncle, killing in advance and forging alliances, you meant not to acknowledge that though His Majesty is dead, there are still a Crown Prince and a Second Prince. So you do remember that I am the Crown Princess."
Sima Daozi did not for a moment believe that even tone meant she had come to discuss the matter with him. "If you have something to say, say it."
Wang Shen'ai smiled knowingly. "You are perceptive, Imperial Uncle, so I won't keep you in suspense. Now that the Heavenly Screen has appeared, the realm is in turmoil, and our Jin's troubles within and without have been laid bare for all to see. Therefore..."
"I must borrow Imperial Uncle's head, to settle the realm in peace."
It was not a proposal, but a notice.
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