Chapter 186: Autumn Grasshoppers

There was a man whose courtesy name was "Botong," but his surname was not Zhou — it was Peng, and his full name was Peng Chong.

"Has the imperial army... gone a little too far?"

It was also mid-September of the third year of Dihuang. As they drew near Wuyan — which should now be called Youyan City — Peng Chong, a Clerk to the Grand Minister of Works, could scarcely believe his own eyes.

Though all along the march, Peng Chong had already seen and heard plenty about the wretched discipline of the vanguard, General of Renewal Lian Dan's troops, he had never imagined that in just a few short days, the imperial army could lay waste to Wuyan — once fabulously wealthy and known as the metropolis of Yan Province — turning it into a city of ghosts.

What tremendous ability, truly!

First they smelled it. The unbroken rain of the past few days had soaked the corpses piled by the roadside, making them swell. The skin, greenish-black like drumheads stretched taut, concealed flesh rotting within — a foul, suffocating stench. Then, baked under the blazing sun, the odor grew even more intense.

And since the entire area around Wuyan had been slaughtered clean by the government troops, there were not enough men left to dig pits; the bodies could only be heaped together and burned haphazardly. Peng Chong had been ordered to bring able-bodied laborers precisely for this task. Everywhere, corpses were being incinerated, and for scores of li around, smoke hung dense and heavy, coalescing into a pall like fog.

Then came the sight that stunned the eyes. Around the city walls, corpses lay stacked crosswise in the fields. Passing by every gully and pond, one saw bodies with limbs pillowed upon one another, eyes staring in death. Along the main road, tall mounds of severed heads — "triumphal pyramids" — had been raised as symbols of the imperial army's "quelling of rebellion" and flaunting of martial might. They stood at nearly every post station.

Peng Chong also noticed that only a small portion of them had eyebrows smeared brownish-red with mud — genuine Red Eyebrows. The rest were mostly innocent commoners.

Last of all, they heard it. In the hamlets and villages beyond the city, among the gloomy groves, weeping sounds formed a mournful chorus. Now and then, one glimpsed the stumbling figures of those who had luckily hidden and escaped the slaughter — a father calling for his son, a husband calling for his wife. By the grassy banks and streams, the wails of infants were everywhere, too harrowing to bear.

All along the way, the laborers Peng Chong was escorting had long since vomited up their entire breakfast. By the time they reached the edge of Wuyan to report in, everyone was listless and drained of spirit, gradually growing numb and accustomed to the cruelty of the age.

Peng Chong could only grit his teeth and persist. "Clerk to the Army's Grand Minister of Works, Peng Chong! Reporting as ordered, bringing five hundred laborers to accompany the army."

The colonel looked up and glanced at him. "You're not from the Guanzhong region, are you?"

Peng Chong replied, "I am a man of Wan in Nanyang!"

The colonel said, puzzled, "Your accent doesn't sound like Nanyang either."

Peng Chong hastily bowed with clasped hands. "Your Honor is astute to discern even this. I did indeed grow up in Yuyang in You Province, and have picked up some frontier patois."

His background was quite similar to that of Bao Yong, the Merit Evaluator of Shangdang. He was originally from a powerful Nanyang family; his father had served as Governor of Yuyang under the Former Han, and Peng Chong had grown up in Yuyang from childhood.

During the reign of Emperor Ping of Han, his father, loyal to the House of Han and refusing to attach himself to Wang Mang's faction, was killed. Fortunately, the clan was not implicated, and Peng Chong could only slink back to his ancestral home. When he came of age, he tried to become a minor official.

Strangely enough, Wang Mang seemed to want to display his magnanimity, wiping the slate clean of Former Han matters and even choosing not to pursue the descendants of Great Han loyalists.

Because of his outstanding performance, Peng Chong had been selected the year before last to enter Chang'an as a Gentleman of the Grand Minister of Works. By a twist of fate, he was then reassigned to serve in the Eastern Expedition army.

The colonel sneered. "You'd best be careful. In this army, the basis for judging whether someone is a Red Eyebrow rebel, apart from those eyebrows, is whether they speak the Taishan dialect. Whether it's Nanyang or Yuyang speech, to the ears of the Yong and Yu province soldiers in the ranks, it doesn't sound much different from Taishan dialect. If your enunciation isn't clear, beware of being killed by mistake."

Peng Chong found this utterly absurd. What kind of method was that for identifying rebels? By that logic, weren't all the people of Taishan Commandery Red Eyebrows?

The colonel, however, said with a laugh, "Who can blame us? When the Red Eyebrow bandits rose up here in Wuyan, they tried to slaughter every official with an out-of-town accent. The General of Renewal is simply continuing to use their own method to screen for rebels."

He gave Peng Chong a good scare. "Since we can't tell from speech, we can only go by that skin of yours. You absolutely must not take off that army uniform!"

When the group stepped inside the city walls, the scene was even more horrifying.

The entire street seemed to have been doused in blood. Trampled by passing pedestrians, carts, and horses, it had turned a motley of colors and was even somewhat sticky underfoot. As Peng Chong walked, he understood exactly what was meant by "smashed livers and splattered brains."

At the foot of the city wall, headless corpses were piled as densely as fish scales. Their clothes had been stripped away, making them look exactly like a heap of shrimp with heads pinched off and tails removed. As night fell, the laborers ordered to move the bodies tripped over them several times, falling onto the corpse piles and touching the dead. Some were even driven mad with terror.

There were also a few people in the city who had luckily escaped the imperial army's blades. Without exception, they wore tattered rags, were scorched and battered, with bloodstains caked in patches, their faces streaked as if with rows of melted candle wax, as though their very souls had fled.

Meanwhile, the troops of the General of Renewal, having rolled heads by the thousands and contentedly sheathed their blades, had moved into the great houses of the city. They seized the wealth and silks for themselves, embracing the refined daughters of wealthy households left and right. These women were labeled "bandits' family dependents" and subjected to brutal abuse.

"Is this an imperial army, or wild beasts?"

Peng Chong stared, stunned, and could not help recalling a ballad he had heard along the road.

"Better to meet the Red Eyebrows than the Grand Preceptor! The Grand Preceptor is still bearable, but the General of Renewal slaughters us!"

The General of Renewal, Lian Dan, who had issued the order to massacre the city — what ill intent could he possibly harbor? He was merely serving the court and the Emperor with all his heart and might.

Lian Dan's reasoning was ample: "Wuyan, as the seat of the commandery, had its powerful families and common people collude with the Red Eyebrows, murder the Grand Governor and subordinate magistrates, and rise in arms to answer Fan Chong. Therefore, after our army took the city, we had no choice but to deal a painful blow, using these tens of thousands of heads to warn all the towns of Qing and Yan provinces: never betray the Son of Heaven!"

"If killing ten thousand brings peace to the realm, then they must be killed! Even if it means bearing some infamy, Lian Dan will never shirk it!"

His words were high-sounding, but this sort of city-sacking and prisoner-slaughtering was already old hat for the General of Renewal, Lian Dan. Back when he failed to defeat the Gouding of the southwestern barbarians, he had pulled the brilliant maneuver of massacring neighboring commanderies' tribes to pad his numbers, thereby causing the entire Nanzhong region to rise in revolt and collapse into chaos.

Now, he was merely replicating his past conduct in Yan Province. This move could boost the troops' flagging morale!

He massacred over ten thousand in the city, then reported tens of thousands of severed heads to the court. Thus, "the main Red Eyebrow force" was once again annihilated in Lian Dan's memorial to the throne — a way of giving the Emperor some kind of accounting.

However, when Lian Dan was mustering his forces, he discovered one thing.

Although the army was conscripted from various commanderies and its command structure was chaotic, the Boar-Rush Braves from New Qinzhong had indeed not arrived and were still lingering in Wei territory. The General of Renewal had noticed their absence from the "great victory" at Wuyan.

Upon investigation, he found that the route had actually been set by that "dead" dog-headed strategist, Feng Yan.

From the route to the timing — was this reasonable? It was not reasonable. Even with detours, even conveniently helping Diwu Lun suppress a rebellion along the way, they should have arrived long ago.

Lian Dan was very displeased. He immediately sent men to Wei territory to urge the Boar-Rush Braves to come quickly and rendezvous with him. They must arrive by the start of the tenth month. "Otherwise, they will be charged with the crime of missing a deadline!"

In mid-September, after Grand Preceptor Wang Kuang also arrived at the rendezvous in the slaughtered, emptied city of Wuyan, this pair of Great Xin's "Crouching Dragon and Young Phoenix" began flattering each other in earnest.

Wang Kuang lavishly praised Lian Dan: "It was the General of Renewal who made the decisive call — not to advance along the Ji River line, but to go southeast from Dingtao, detour through Changyi, pass by the flank of the Great Wild Marsh, surmount the peril at Kangfu, and thrust straight into Dongping to seize Youyan City. This move has cut the two great Red Eyebrow armies — the Taishan Red Eyebrows and the Liangshan Red Eyebrows — into two segments, so that head and tail cannot call to each other!"

The Taishan Red Eyebrows were the force of Fan Chong, who had risen earlier; recently their numbers had swelled to a host of one hundred thousand.

The Liangshan Red Eyebrows, on the other hand, operated around the Great Wild Marsh. Their leader was named Dong Xian, with tens of thousands of men, and they had begun to harass Dingtao and Puyang.

Now, the one-hundred-thousand-strong imperial army had fought its way here, seized Dongping, and planted itself squarely between the two Red Eyebrow forces. In Grand Preceptor Wang Kuang's words: "Our force occupies the strategic crossing of Jixi. With Dongping secured and the peril of Kangfu held, the gateway to Liang will not open."

This bout of mutual flattery even restored some of Lian Dan's confidence. He even secretly felt that, while he might be useless against the four barbarian tribes, he was still an old hand at exterminating domestic rebels. As long as he employed the methods used by the Embroidered Uniform Envoys like Bao Shengzhi during Emperor Wu of Han's reign to suppress rioting peasants — killing until heads rolled — none would fail to submit.

But regarding the strategy going forward, Lian Dan and Wang Kuang had a disagreement.

Lian Dan, perhaps feeling that his subordinates were too exhausted from sacking the city, proposed: "The great army has been on the march for months and has newly captured Dongping. We should rest and reorganize once more."

Wang Kuang, however, shook his head and produced an edict sent by His Majesty the Emperor the previous month. "His Majesty says: 'The granaries are empty, the treasuries are bare. Now we can be angry; now we can fight.' Does the General of Renewal still not understand the Son of Heaven's meaning?"

Of course he understood. Disasters raged everywhere — drought, locusts, without cease — and the commandery and kingdom officials drawing two-thousand-picul salaries were withholding grain ever more frequently. Over a hundred thousand men had already eaten wealthy Dingtao into poverty. The longer they dragged this out, the worse it would be for them.

It seemed this campaign could not halt. And then, over whether they should attack the Taishan Red Eyebrows or the Liangshan Red Eyebrows, the two again fell into dispute.

Lian Dan believed: "One burst of spirit, then it flags, then it is spent. Better to strike east directly at the Taishan Red Eyebrows, behead the arch-villain Fan Chong, and thus achieve lasting peace once and for all."

Wang Kuang objected: "Not so. The Liangshan Red Eyebrows are at our rear. If they join forces with the Taishan Red Eyebrows in a pincer attack, our force will be in grave danger. Moreover, the Liangshan Red Eyebrows are weak while Taishan is strong. We should deal with the weak first, then the strong, to let the troops whet their skills."

As for whetting skills — was one Wuyan City not enough?

The two argued to a standstill. In the end, Grand Preceptor Wang Kuang, being one rank higher, made the final decision, and General of Renewal Lian Dan could only agree.

He and Wang Kuang split the great army in two. The Grand Preceptor would take fifty thousand troops to attack the Liangshan Red Eyebrows' Dong Xian, while Lian Dan, with fifty thousand men, would guard Dongping, protecting the Grand Preceptor's rear and guarding against the Taishan Red Eyebrows coming west. Once the Liangshan Red Eyebrows were annihilated, they would join forces and advance east.

"If we succeed, before the third year of Dihuang ends, Your Majesty will hear the good news that the Red Eyebrows have been utterly wiped out!"

While the imperial army divided its forces, the unlucky Peng Chong was still leading the able-bodied men in the grim work of aftermath, burying corpse after innocent corpse. And by the withered grass, the late-autumn grasshoppers still hopped wildly about, oblivious to the fact that their days of jumping were already numbered!

……

In late September, just as Grand Preceptor Wang Kuang led his troops to turn and attack Mount Liang, at Pingyin in Taishan Commandery, barely two hundred li from Wuyan, the main force of the Taishan Red Eyebrows, led by Fan Chong, also emerged from the mountain forests to forage for food.

Fan Chong, slouching as sloppily as ever, was picking lice and fleas from his hair and beard, crushing them viciously between his fingernails whenever he caught one. "Strange to say," he remarked, "ever since that General of Renewal and the Grand Preceptor marched into Yanzhou, more and more people keep coming to join the Red Eyebrows."

Once the common folk discovered that the government troops were even more savage than the Red Eyebrows, they flocked to them like flowing water. By now, Fan Chong was no longer the petty leader of a few hundred men as when he first rose up. Counting the old, the weak, the women and children, and those answering the call under the same name in various places, the Red Eyebrow Army already numbered over a hundred thousand.

Yet Fan Chong still showed no political ambition whatsoever. He still used the same simple ranks from the very beginning — Elder, Attendant, Giant — and still lived day by day on whatever they could plunder.

This time, they had come out of the mountains not because he intended to meet the imperial army in battle, but because their grain was completely exhausted. If they did not come out to seize another wave of supplies, they would soon be reduced to cannibalism.

Chi Zhaoping, who had been roaming the Yellow River flood zone after her failed attack on Yuancheng, had gathered another ten thousand followers. She too brought her band to join the Red Eyebrows, linking up with Fan Chong at Pingyin.

As soon as this remarkable woman met Fan Chong, she spoke of the wealth of Hebei: "I am willing to lead the way for King Fan. First, we take Yuancheng, burn Wang Mang's imperial temple, and dig up his ancestral graves. Then we can cross the river and let you gallop freely wherever you wish."

Fan Chong was very displeased, feeling that Chi Zhaoping had broken his rules. "I told you to call me Elder Fan. Call me king or marquis again, and I'll turn on you, I swear!"

And the reason this thick-bearded giant gave for refusing to march north was something Chi Zhaoping would never have expected in a thousand guesses.

"I've heard Hebei is cold."

Fan Chong looked back at the ragged Red Eyebrow followers behind him. No matter how many battles they fought, they still circled around the Qing, Xu, and Yan regions, unwilling to stray too far from home. Most still dreamed of returning to their fields. Hebei? They had no desire to go!

And just at that moment, they learned the news that the imperial army had massacred Wuyan and was now attacking the Mount Liang bandits.

"Those heaven-cursed government troops!"

Fan Chong, who had stubbornly refused Chi Zhaoping's earnest pleas to go to Hebei, immediately leapt to his feet, lice forgotten. "We must go save them!" he declared.

Any ordinary leader would have launched into a grand speech about how if the lips are gone, the teeth will be cold. But Fan Chong's reasoning was so simple and unadorned that Chi Zhaoping felt like laughing.

This man — the great Elder of the Red Eyebrows, the one the whole realm watched, the one the court both hated and feared — bellowed in his thick, barely intelligible Langya dialect: "Since we're all poor wretches driven to desperation with no way out, since we've all dyed our eyebrows and use the same name…"

"Then whether they're the Mount Liang Red Eyebrows or the Great River Red Eyebrows, they're all our own blood brothers, born of different fathers and different mothers!"

He glanced at Chi Zhaoping. "Or sisters!"

Then, amid the frenzied cheers of his followers, Fan Chong grabbed a handful of earth, smeared it across his eyebrows, and thrust his arm toward Wuyan in the southwest.

"Move out! Kill the government troops! Save Mount Liang!"

……

PS: An early update, for once.

There will be bonus chapters tomorrow.