Chapter 199: Xin Qiji's Indignation

Yanshan, Piaoyuan.

Xin Qiji received the news on the twenty-sixth of the twelfth lunar month. The news did not come from Lin'an, but from Jiankang. Tian Hu, an old soldier who had served under him in Zhenjiang and had retired years ago, rode a lame pack horse from Jiankang, traveling day and night for two days to reach Yanshan. This old soldier had once fought Jin soldiers alongside Xin Qiji in General Geng Jing's camp, later followed him to fight the Tea Merchant Army in Jiangxi, and was subsequently dismissed by the court, returning to his hometown in Jiankang to open a tea shop to make a living. When the Northern Expedition first began, Tian Hu had written to Xin Qiji, saying that young people in Jiankeng had all signed up for the army, that drums and gongs were beaten daily at the docks, and that this time they would truly cross the Yellow River. In the letter, Tian Hu asked Xin Qiji—Brother You'an, is this time real? Xin Qiji did not reply to that letter. He did not know how to reply.

Now Tian Hu stood in the courtyard of the Xin family by Piaoyuan, his tattered cotton jacket covered in mud spots, his face's wrinkles carved by the cold wind like deep gullies. Xin Qiji invited him into the study and poured a bowl of hot tea. Tian Hu did not drink the tea; he pulled a crumpled official gazette from his chest and placed it on the table.

The gazette was a full transcript posted by the Jiankang prefectural office. It contained all the terms of the Song Jin peace treaty. Fifty thousand taels of silver and fifty thousand bolts of silk as annual tribute. Three million taels as military aid. Ceding the two prefectures of Tang and Deng. Sending Han Tuozhou's head to the Jin. The state letter self-confessed "misleading the nation and initiating conflict." The final clause—"If the grasslands advance south to attack Jin, the Southern Song must provide grain and military funds, open the Yangtze River waterway for transport, and assist the Jin in establishing a second defensive line from the Huaihe to the Qin Ling."

Xin Qiji read the gazette from beginning to end twice. The first time he read very quickly, as if trying to pry these characters off the paper and stuff them into his brain. The second time he read very slowly, pausing after each clause, as if trying to take apart every character to see the bones inside clearly. When he read the joint defense clause, his finger stopped on the four characters "assist the Jin," remaining there for a long time.

Tian Hu sat opposite, daring not to make a sound. He had followed Xin Qiji for decades and had seen Xin Qiji angry—when angry, he would slam the table and rise, his sword drawn three inches, fire burning in his eyes, and no one could stop him. But he had never seen Xin Qiji like this. Xin Qiji's face was not red, but white. From forehead to chin, like a sheet of paper drained of all blood. The hand holding the gazette trembled, but that trembling was not fear; it was a person using all their strength to control themselves from going mad.

Xin Qiji slowly placed the gazette on the table, flattened it with his palm, then stood up and walked to the window.

Outside the window, Piaoyuan shimmered with a faint light in the winter twilight. Spring water seeped from the stone cracks, dropping one by one onto the moss, the sound extremely faint. In the distance, the mountain shadows turned into a blur of ink-black in the twilight. He stood there, his shoulders rising and falling slightly. Tian Hu heard his breathing—deep and slow, as if every inhalation tried to suck the entire winter of Yanshan into his lungs, and every exhalation wanted to spit the fire from his lungs out, but the fire could not be spit out because it had already been frozen.

"Tian Hu." Xin Qiji spoke, his voice surprisingly calm, "Do you remember, back in General Geng Jing's camp, how many of us were there?"

Tian Hu paused for a moment: "I remember. General Zhang, Jia Rui, you, me, and..."

"And Wang Shilong," Xin Qiji said. "Wang Shilong, a hunter from Tai'an, the best at archery technique, able to hit a rabbit's eye from three hundred paces away. On the day the Jin soldiers surrounded the main camp, he held the rear alone, emptying three quivers of arrows. I asked him if he wanted to break out together, and he said one sentence." Tian Hu lowered his head; he did not remember that sentence.

Xin Qiji remembered. "He said, You'an, my mother at home is seventy years old; I do not want her to see me kneeling before the Jin people." Xin Qiji's voice remained very calm, but Tian Hu saw his back trembling, not just his shoulders, but his entire body shaking outward from the spine. "Later I learned that the Jin soldiers hung his corpse on the Tai'an city gate for seven days. I was twenty-one that year. I thought I would never in my life see a Song Ren kneeling before the Jin." He turned around, looking at Tian Hu. There were no tears in his eyes, only the ash left after a fire had burned to its extreme.

"But I saw it today. Not one person kneeling, but an entire court kneeling. Tian Hu, do you know what this 'joint defense' clause means?" Tian Hu shook his head; he indeed had not quite understood it.

"It means—" Xin Qiji walked to the table, picked up that page of the gazette, pointed at that line of text, and his voice suddenly lost its calmness, like a flood suppressed for too long finally finding a breach. "It means that the Great Song spent eighty years, spent the lives of countless soldiers, spent Han Tuozhou's head, and what it finally gained was not the recovery of the Central Plains, not the washing away of national shame—it was transporting grain for the Jin! Building fortifications for the Jin! Acting as a shield for the Jin!"

His hand suddenly jerked upward, and the gazette rustled as it was flung into the air. The paper flipped twice in mid-air, slowly drifting down, landing on the table corner, on the floor tiles, and beside the tea bowl. Tian Hu had never seen Xin Qiji throw things.

"Yuanjia carelessly—" Xin Qiji suddenly recited these four characters, his voice hoarse as if ground by sand and gravel. He collapsed into his chair, one hand supporting his forehead, the other hanging uselessly by his knee. He remembered the poem "Yong Yu Le" he wrote in Zhenjiang. At that time, the Northern Expedition had just begun, Han Tuozhou was full of spirit, and he stood on Beigu Pavilion looking at the Yangtze, his heart full of worry. He wrote "Yuanjia carelessly, sealing Mount Juxu, winning only a frantic glance north"—he feared Han Tuozhou would underestimate the enemy and advance rashly, fearing the Northern Expedition would repeat the failure of the Liu Song's Yuanjia era. But he never in a million years expected the ending to be more tragic than the Yuanjia failure. The Yuanjia failure was merely the loss of hundreds of thousands of troops. But the peace treaty the Great Song signed today bet the entire Jiangshan and the state as a burial offering to the Jin. His worries all came true, but the way they came true was ten times more cruel than he imagined. What did "winning only a frantic glance north" amount to? Now there was not even the qualification for "a frantic glance north"—because the enemy was not attacking from the south, but from the north, and the Great Song was acting as logistics for another enemy, blocking the way for the Jin at the very front.

Even more absurdly, his fear lay not in the strength of the Jin, but in the rise of the grasslands. Back then, he smelled the bloodiness of the north from the Jin's abnormal deployments and pieced together the outline of the New Ming Party from the mouths of one returning refugee after another. He had written in a memorial to Han Tuozhou: "The reason the Jin people abandoned small cities and protected Dacheng was not that they could not defend, but that they did not want to exhaust themselves against our army. Their elites are all on the northern border; the southern front is merely a pawn used to delay time." Now this statement was fully confirmed, but the cost of confirming it was the phrase "joint defense against the grasslands" written in black and white in the peace treaty. His despair was not because the Great Song lost—the Great Song had lost too many times, and he was already accustomed to finding the next opportunity amidst the Great Song's failures. His despair was because the Great Song had tied itself to the Jin's sinking broken ship, and tied itself willingly.

He remained silent for a long time, then spoke. He was not speaking to Tian Hu, but to himself. His voice was so low it was barely audible.

"Trading ten thousand words of strategies for pacifying the barbarians for the tree-planting books of the eastern neighbor." He was reciting the "Zhe Gu Tian" he wrote at the end of the Shaoxing era. That year, he was dismissed from his post as Assistant Judge in Jiangyin, lived in leisure at Daihu, with a heart full of strategies having nowhere to be used, so he could only plant trees to kill time. "Ten Essays on the Beauty of Celery," "Nine Discussions," those Northern Expedition strategies he wrote by lamplight through the night, were all finally pressed into the court's old piles of paper, exchanged for books on planting trees. And at this moment, even this "tree-planting book" could not be exchanged anymore—because the fields to be cultivated were to be taken by the court to pay off debts. He could not even become a simple farmer.

He stood up and walked to the writing desk. Spread on the desk was the "Art of War" by Sun Zi that he was annotating; the ink had long dried, and a thin layer of dust had settled on the bamboo slips. He pushed the bamboo slips aside, spread out a sheet of paper, picked up his brush, and held it suspended above the paper. The twilight outside the window had already become too thick to dissolve, and the night wind drilled in through the window cracks, making the oil lamp's flame sway back and forth. He had sat under the lamp for forty years—forty years ago he returned from the south of Shandong, full of spirit, thinking the court would recover the Central Plains under his hand; thirty years ago he pacified bandits in Jiangxi, winning dozens of battles large and small without a single defeat, fully believing the court would appoint him for the Northern Expedition; twenty years ago he defended Zhenjiang, facing the map day after day to study the Jin's northern border defenses, waiting for the court's order. Now he was sixty-two years old. What he waited for was not the horn of the Northern Expedition, but a gazette. The gazette read: The Southern Song must provide grain and military funds for the Jin, and assist the Jin in establishing a second defensive line.

Forty years ago, when he was killing Jin soldiers in General Geng Jing's camp, if someone had told him that forty years later the Great Song would sign a peace treaty, self-confess "misleading the nation," and write transporting grain for the Jin into the state letter, he would have slashed that person with his blade. Now what that person said was true.

His brush went down, landing heavily on the paper, the ink spreading. He was writing that poem "Yong Yu Le," the ci he wrote in Zhenjiang, now copying it word by word again. When he copied "Yuanjia carelessly, sealing Mount Juxu, winning only a frantic glance north," his hand trembled slightly; when he copied "Forty-three years, in the gaze I still remember, the beacon fires along the Yangzhou road," his eyes finally turned red; when he copied the last two lines, he paused for a long time, then forcefully slammed the brush down—"Who asks now? Is Lian Po old? Can he still eat?"

Lian Po was old; the King of Zhao sent an envoy to see if he could still eat, wanting to know if he could still fight. Lian Po ate a dou of rice and ten jin of meat in front of the envoy, put on armor and mounted a horse to show he was usable. But what about him, Xin Qiji? He could still eat, still drink, still wield a fifty jin heavy iron spear. But the treaty was signed, grain had to be transported for the Jin, defenses had to be built for the Jin; what war could he still fight? For whom would his blade cut? For whom would he annotate the Art of War? No one came to ask. The King of Zhao at least sent an envoy to ask Lian Po; the Great Song's court did not even ask. He waited a lifetime, waiting for the court to self-confess "misleading the nation and initiating conflict," waiting for the people of the Great Song to transport grain for the Jin. What use was it for him, Xin Qiji, to be able to eat? What use to be able to ride a horse? What use to be able to kill people? Even if he could eat, there was nowhere to fight.

After writing the last character, he placed the brush on the inkstone and suddenly smiled. That laugh was very light and very short, like the sound of a withered winter branch being stepped on and broken. Tian Hu stood at the door, daring not to move, nor to leave. He watched as Xin Qiji slowly stood up and walked to the map hanging on the wall. That map was drawn by Xin Qiji himself, drawn over decades, revised again and again, with layers of ink lines overlapping, and some parts already worn through. Xin Qiji raised his hand, his finger landing on the line of the Huaihe, pausing for an instant, then slowly moving north—moving to the Yellow River, to the Yanshan, to the blank area of the Jin's northern border. That area he had marked very vaguely because he had no more detailed intelligence. He only knew there was a force there called the New Ming Party, red flags, firearms, cavalry like a wall. He stared at that blank area for a long time, then turned around, walked to the door, and looked at the old pine tree in the courtyard. The pine tree was planted the year he moved to Piaoyuan; twenty years had passed, and it had grown twice as tall as him. Moonlight shone on the pine branches, which were covered with a thin layer of frost.

"Tian Hu." He called out once.

"Your general is here." Tian Hu instinctively straightened his back.

Xin Qiji turned around and looked at him. In the moonlight, Xin Qiji's face was no longer the color of ash from just now; something had reignited within it. It was not hope; the space left to him in that era had no word for "hope." It was something as hard as granite, something that refused to bend.

"You take a few words for me. Deliver them to everyone you can reach—former subordinates on the front lines, old friends in the Jianghu, younger generations in the army, anyone who still remembers how to write the two characters 'Great Song.' Tell them four things." He held up four fingers, bending them down one by one.

"Do not forget the grasslands. The Jin people are not our enemies, at least not now. The true enemy is in the north, that red flag. Whoever forgets this point is the next minister of a fallen nation."

"Do not trust the Jin people. The four characters 'states of lips and teeth' are written on paper. When the Jin people cannot stop the grasslands, they will unhesitatingly push the Great Song to the front as a shield. At that time, the peace treaty will save no one."

"Do not become slaves. The peace treaty signed by Shi Miyuan is not just ceding land and paying indemnities; it is pulling out the Great Song's backbone. From now on, we cannot raise our heads before the Jin people, nor can we raise our heads before the power behind the Jin people. But the backbone grows on one's own body; it cannot be pulled out by a single state letter from the court. I, Xin Qiji, cannot kneel. You all must not kneel either."

After speaking the first three fingers, he paused for a moment. Then he bent the last one.

"Do not forget—I am still a subject of the Great Song."

Tian Hu's tears came down. This old soldier who had fought for half his life, who had broken three ribs, been captured by Jin soldiers, had chili water poured on him, and survived, had never shed a single tear. Now he stood in the winter night of Yanshan, looking at this sixty-two-year-old white-haired old general before him, and his tears flowed uncontrollably down.

"Marshal Xin..." Tian Hu knelt down and kowtowed. "Your general has remembered. Please take care."

Xin Qiji waved his hand, exactly as he had done many years ago when waving to Lu You by Mirror Lake—not a denial, but a helplessness seeping out from the cracks in his bones. Then he turned and went back into the study, closing the door. The oil lamp jumped once from the draft of the door, then steadied itself again. He walked to the map, gently circled the vague blank area of the Jin's northern border on the map with his finger, then picked up his brush and wrote four characters next to that blank area.

"Red flags rolling freely."

He put down the brush, sat in the chair, and looked out the window at the winter night of Yanshan. The night was very quiet, so quiet one could hear the sound of snow sliding off the pine branches. The water of Piaoyuan was still dripping, like a water clock that would never stop. The Northern Expedition was dead. The Great Song's backbone was pulled out by Shi Miyuan and broken in two; one half was given to the Jin, and the other half was buried by the banks of the Huaihe. But he, Xin Qiji, was not yet dead. His old bones could still hold on for a few more years. Hold on until whatever day it may be. Hold on until these eyes personally see the red flags rolling freely from the north, hold on until these ears personally hear the roar of iron horses and frozen rivers, or hold on until the day he can no longer hold on—no matter which day it is, he would keep his eyes open.