BST - Chapter 9
Chapter 9: Oh No, the Rebel Was Me
"Jinu?"
"It is the ji of jizhu, to live under someone else's roof," Liu Yu explained to the noblewoman before him.
In rank, he was only a common soldier, a man who needed an introduction from Sun Wuzhong just to come before a person of rank, and yet this year he was already past thirty.
Even within the Beifu Army, a man born at the bottom had to spend a long time before he could be noticed. That was the reality of the time.
Fortunately, Liu Yu was not one for self-pity. At his age, he could speak of the past with perfect composure.
"Not long after my mother bore me, she died of a childbed illness. My ... father had no means to raise a child and wanted to cast me away. It was my aunt who took pity on me, took me into her home, and raised me. That is how I came by the childhood name Jinu."
"So that is how it is," Wang Shen'ai said thoughtfully.
Jinu...
Her attention drifted for only an instant. "Then you are the one."
Sun Wuzhong's cheek twitched. "It is ... just decided like that?"
When the time came to recommend candidates, he had put forward the answer he thought most fitting, but surely it should not be this casual?
Wang Shen'ai said: "I asked you to raise a force of picked men. You did not come back at once with two hundred names; you said the selection would be finished by noon tomorrow. That shows you are not a careless general."
"Then look at this Adjutant Liu. One glance tells me he has never slackened in his martial training. His gaze is clear and honest, his manner steady, and he does not shrink from speaking of his family and his past. He is an honest, dependable soldier. The post of commander of the bodyguard is naturally his. Well? Is it you, the man recommending him, who lacks courage?"
Sun Wuzhong nodded hard. "You are right. Whether he can bear the weight of the task, one test from you will show."
Wang Shen'ai clapped her hands together. "Now that is what a man about to go to war ought to say."
"General Liu!"
Liu Laozhi stepped forward at once.
He did not know whether it was his imagination, but when the words "General Liu" left Wang Shen'ai's lips, Sun Wuzhong and Liu Yu, both standing here, cast him looks of the deepest envy.
And yet an unaccountable chill ran down Liu Laozhi's back.
Wang Shen'ai said: "I leave matters here to you. Do not forget what I told you before."
The court now faced troubles within and without. Whether the troops of Sima Daozi and his son would withdraw after marching into Jiankang was anyone's guess.
Whatever Liu Laozhi had been doing before, weighing the strategic situation or genuinely fearing to fight, he must now show a hard and resolute front. She had already placed military authority in his hands. She only hoped he would not disappoint her.
Liu Laozhi hastily bowed and answered: "Rest assured, Your Highness."
He rose to find that the Crown Princess had already descended the city tower at an unhurried pace.
Judged by bearing and figure alone, she and the Beifu soldiers on the other side stood at opposite extremes. The extravagance of the Eastern Jin royal house and the flowing robes and sleeves of the Wei and Jin gentry were displayed with the utmost clarity in her dress.
Yet strangely, watching Liu Yu fall in behind Wang Shen'ai's steps, he somehow felt that the Crown Princess's retreating figure was the taller of the two. As though, the moment she walked back into the palace city, she had taken up the fortune of Jiankang upon her shoulders.
"How much grain does a soldier of the Beifu Army receive each day?"
Liu Yu was startled for an instant, then saw that Wang Shen'ai had turned back and asked again: "You come out of the Beifu Army, and by your age you must have spent a good many years in its ranks. Over these years, how much grain has each soldier of the Beifu Army received per day?"
Liu Yu answered: "In times of peace, roughly three sheng a day. In wartime, a little under five."
"Then this ration ... is very much short of the mark," Wang Shen'ai concluded after a moment's thought.
Liu Yu's eyes flickered. He gave no answer, but his silence was answer enough.
Yet that silence owed something as well to the swift judgment the Crown Princess had just pronounced.
Before the Jin royal house had crossed the river east, there had been that ridiculous business of "why not let them eat meat gruel." Add to that the drastic cuts to the Beifu Army's pay and rations in recent years, and Liu Yu had nearly come to believe that the men at the top no longer knew how much a common soldier ought to eat.
Wang Shen'ai said: "The day before yesterday I went through the writings of Jin's ancestors. They speak of the days when the great ancestor Emperor Xuan warred with Zhuge Kongming, and note that within an army, three sheng a day was a ration for invalids. Now that the Beifu Army is being called up to protect the sovereign, we cannot have them go hungry."
"The bodyguard chosen tomorrow will need separate training and fine armor. I do not ask them to match ten men each, but they should be able to best three or five good fighters, and their food must never fall short."
Liu Yu reminded her: "There was an edict from the court earlier, that from the Minister over the Masses downward, none may draw more than seven sheng of grain a day."
"And who made that rule?" Wang Shen'ai gave a cold snort.
Liu Yu was struck dumb. "...The Prince of Kuaiji."
Sima Daozi had made it.
Well then. It seemed he need not say another word.
Wang Shen'ai: "The man is dead. Let this rule die with him. As for the grain for the Beifu Army and the bodyguard, I will find a way."
The Beifu elite summoned to the palace the next day had assumed that being selected as inner palace bodyguards meant filling gaps in the Imperial Guard, and that after so many years of weakness, and having to deal with all manner of odd members of the imperial clan at court, it could hardly be called a good posting.
To their surprise, no sooner had they reported in than good news reached them from Liu Yu. The bodyguard would be issued one hu of rice every ten days (ten sheng a day), nearly double the previous amount. On the rest day closing each ten-day stretch, if they had committed no fault, part of the rice could be exchanged for meat, eggs, and other food of substance. Fine armor had also been drawn from the armories, for their use at any time.
Their former dejection was swept away at once. Nothing in this world lifted a man's spirits like a full belly. It was the plainest truth there was.
They did not know how the Crown Princess had managed it, but following her orders could hardly be wrong.
A few days later Wang Xun came to visit. His eyelids twitched as he watched the rations being handed out. "Where did you get the money to buy this grain?"
Though Wang Shen'ai had obtained an edict from the Empress Dowager, that did not mean she could actually requisition the imperial treasury with the power of a Crown Princess. These supplementary rations for the soldiers, meant to buy their hearts, were paid out of her own purse!
Put that way, the soldiers who had received the benefit had not directed their gratitude at the wrong person after all.
Wang Shen'ai turned a page of the book in her hands, as though she had not heard the doubt in Wang Xun's voice at all, and answered evenly: "You may say it is Noble Lady Zhang's thanks to me for saving her life, or you may call it a bribe from her. Without the Heavenly Screen, this generous gift would most likely have fallen into Sima Daozi's hands. Now that it falls to me, and it can keep her alive as well, what is the harm?"
Noble Lady Zhang had been a favored consort for at least ten years and was no fool without a scheme or two. The wealth she had accumulated was not small. It was not hard for her to fund more than half a year of rations for the bodyguard and still spare something good for the Beifu Army.
Wang Xun drew a sharp breath. "You accepted her things?"
"What of it?" Wang Shen'ai finally lifted her eyes from the page before her and looked at Wang Xun.
She set the scroll down on the table with a measured smack.
Wang Xun found himself looking straight into a pair of cold eyes.
"Do not think that because I have barely shown my face in public these past few days, I do not know what you have all been saying in private."
"The private holdings of Sima Daozi and his son are not far below the Emperor's own. Who is to confiscate them, and how, has cost you no small amount of thought, has it not? And you still have come to no conclusion. If I waited for that money to fill the imperial treasury, then passed through layer after layer of audit before it reached me, the Crown Princess, those soldiers would have starved to death long ago!"
"Or does my clan uncle think I should instead wait on the bounty of the Wang Clan of Langya? Have you settled on how to avert the death that is to come?"
Wang Xun choked. "...I have already passed on to the clan what you said that day. But the Wang family's way runs deep. Changing how we conduct ourselves is not the work of a single day."
Wang Shen'ai said nothing.
Wang Xun had the sense that this was not acceptance of his explanation, but simple unwillingness to speak.
During the coup that day, and even when Sima Daozi was killed the day after, Wang Shen'ai had been full of the panic of one whose fate was not her own. Now ... she still kept to the "proper duty" of a Crown Princess, and beyond keeping a private army and rooting out the menace at court, had done nothing extra. Yet beneath that calm and frail exterior something indescribable seemed to lie coiled, ready at any moment to burst forth like molten rock.
But looking again, she was clearly the same as before. It was only that from the straightened neck to the raised line of her jaw, everything spoke of one thing: disappointment. She was deeply disappointed.
"This matter, I will ..."
"Your Highness!" Liu Yu came hurrying in from outside and cut Wang Xun short. "General Liu has intercepted a secret dispatch. He asked me to bring it to you first."
Seeing that Wang Xun was also present, this "steady" commander of the bodyguard at once stood properly to one side and said not another word.
Wang Xun, however, could hardly keep his eyes from going wide as he tried to make sense of what Liu Yu had just said.
What did it mean that General Liu had intercepted a secret dispatch and brought it to the Crown Princess to review first? Only a few days had passed!
Wang Shen'ai did not so much as glance aside. She took the secret military report from Liu Yu's hands, broke it open, and began to read.
Before Wang Xun had worked anything out, he heard Wang Shen'ai say through a frown: "Something has happened."
His expression changed. "What has happened?"
Wang Shen'ai's tone was heavy: "Something has happened in Jingzhou!"
Before the order of the court could be reestablished after the change of throne, the Heavenly Screen had already brought further consequences.
The armies of the Eastern Jin, apart from that singular force the Beifu Army, were for the most part held in the hands of the great aristocratic clans.
After the court crossed the river east, the strength of the central army fell away astonishingly, and the court grew ever more dependent on the regional forces.
Once the great clans put down roots in the regions, these local armies were bound to the clans by close ties of retainers and former subordinates. Even had the court wished to replace a commander, it would have been very difficult to take real control of military power back.
The Jingzhou army had long sat under the command of the Huan clan. Though its commander had been changed after Huan Chong's death, it remained bound to the Huans by a thousand ties.
The present governor of Jingzhou was Yin Zhongkan. He had entered office on the strength of his family's prestige, and won the late Emperor's trust, which led to his exceptional appointment.
Yet Yin Zhongkan was, in truth, ill-suited to being a great regional governor. He attended to everything in person and was plain and frugal, but he had no talent for decision and could achieve little.
Moreover, the weather in Jingzhou these past few years had been most irregular, with floods and droughts striking year after year. One year floodwaters from the Shu region poured into Jingzhou. The dikes there had not been strengthened in advance, and the flood destroyed the homes of several thousand families.
Commanding troops was, in fact, much like handling the great affairs of the people's livelihood.
When the Heavenly Screen fell so suddenly and the Son of Heaven died, Yin Zhongkan lost his head at once.
Among his subordinates, however, was a man of unusual standing: Huan Xuan, whom Sima Daozi had wanted dead. He offered Yin Zhongkan advice on the spot.
Huan Xuan urged that the thing to do now was to join forces with the other commanders holding posts in the regions and march on Jiankang together. First drive back the rebel army assembled by Wang Guobao and the rest, build up prestige, and then wait and see how matters turned out.
Everyone knew exactly what the two Sima princes were like. The second prince most likely did not have the daring to swallow the whole realm.
In that case, there was no need for them to remain loyal servants of the Sima clan. Thinking a little more of themselves could hardly be wrong.
Yin Zhongkan, however, would not agree. He held that with every side's intentions so uncertain, if they marched first they would draw censure. From Jingzhou to Jiankang was farther than from Jingkou and other places, so they would come off the worse. Better to wait for the court to settle on a successor, or for the Heavenly Screen to appear again, and only then decide on a strategy.
In any case, Jingzhou's forces were strong, and if a northern expedition came one day, theirs would be an indispensable contribution. No one would treat them badly.
"On the surface, the Jingzhou troops are being reorganized and dispatched under Yin Zhongkan's orders. In reality ..."
Wang Shen'ai could not but admire it. Some men were born with the makings of a hero of that kind, men who would never sit still awaiting their death and would let slip no chance they could seize. "Huan Xuan has killed Yin Zhongkan and, with the old Huan retainers, taken back command of the Jingzhou army."
That Yin Zhongkan's cousin had married Huan Xuan's sister had done nothing to change his fatal predicament.
She gave Wang Xun a cold laugh. "Clan uncle, do you see? This is the price of your hesitation."
She swept up the secret letter and called to Liu Yu. "Come. We go to find General Liu."
But she had barely stepped through the doorway when a panic-stricken palace servant caught at her sleeve. "Your Highness, look!"
Wang Shen'ai looked to the horizon. The Heavenly Screen, which had gone dim for days, was slowly lighting up again, as though the energy it had spent was being charged up once more.
She set aside for the moment the shock the Jingzhou affair had dealt her and fixed all her attention on the Heavenly Screen. She could not afford to miss these fleeting pieces of news.
In only a few breaths it had gone from a faint white glow to a fully lit screen, and the image from before it had "gone offline" rose back into view.
Reassuringly, what came after was exactly the sentence where it had stopped, as though it had never vanished at all. Only the background of the Heavenly Screen had changed from night to day.
[To avoid anyone saying again that I am a mindless admirer of the Yong'an Emperor, I shall relate what follows in the more objective voice of an observer.]
[When I speak of checks and balances, one might equally say that this was the true path of Emperor Yong'an's growth.]
[Among the artifacts archaeologists have excavated are a number of the Yong'an Emperor's reading notes. We can see that, in order to avoid crossing certain people for a time and to adapt more quickly to a changing situation, the Yong'an Emperor read a great many books in this period and wrote a considerable number of annotations.]
[One sentence appears again and again in the Yong'an Emperor's hand, a question he repeatedly posed to himself when searching for a way to survive:]
On the Heavenly Screen appeared an image, a line of writing like a fragment cut from a bamboo slip. Special treatment had rendered it perfectly legible.
[Where does power come from?]
"...!"
Had everyone's eyes not been on the Heavenly Screen at that moment, someone would surely have seen the Crown Princess's face suddenly twist with shock and astonishment.
Wang Shen'ai restrained herself with all her strength from raising a hand to rub her eyes, the better to see the image before her.
It was not only because the Heavenly Screen showed a line of characters that were, by this era's standards, missing arms and legs.
It was also because the line of writing before everyone was unmistakably in her own hand. Before Wang Xun came to her that day, she had written the same line on that very scroll.
If that was the Yong'an Emperor's handwriting...
Wang Shen'ai's gaze went blank. She stared rigidly at those unbearably familiar strokes, assembled into a line of evidence clearer than clear.
If she was not mistaken ... no, it seemed there was no need to guess. The Heavenly Screen had already told her.
She was the Yong'an Emperor the Heavenly Screen spoke of, that peerless hero who, as a transmigrator, had unified north and south!
Oh no! She was the rebel who would hold the Son of Heaven hostage and usurp the throne!
Comments
Post a Comment