Chapter 375: A Land of Plenty

In mid-April, in Pei Commandery of Yu Province, at Daze Village in Qi County north of the Huai River, the sky was thick with clouds pressing down so low it was hard to breathe.

At the end of the Qin dynasty, this was where Chen Sheng and Wu Guang cried out, "Are kings, lords, generals, and ministers bred in the bone?" But now, another group of the poor and low-born had no interest at all in princely rank — they only wanted to use their hoes to dig food from the earth.

During the half-year occupation by the Red Eyebrow Army, the great clans of Pei Commandery had been wiped out entirely, and the Zhao clan, the foremost family of Qi County, had not survived either. The two sons of the Zhao family had fled among the common folk; anything worth taking had long since been looted.

Yet now the Red Eyebrows had gone and come back again, all because of a local rumor.

"The Zhao family head served as Wang Mang's General of Field Agriculture, specially in charge of military farming. Grain was carted home wagon after wagon. They say a great cellar was dug beneath the fortified manor, scores of zhang deep, storing several thousand dan of grain!"

North of the Huai was in great famine. The millet planted in spring was still only green shoots, but the old grain was already eaten up. In their hunt for grain, the Red Eyebrow troops left in Pei had grown frantic, ready to scrape the very skin off the earth. The rumor sounded absurd, but the Red Eyebrow Attendant Officer Liu Xiaqing believed it true and brought his men back to the ruined Zhao family manor.

Meanwhile, Liu Penzi and the others squatted outside the manor, feeding firewood to the stoves they had set up. The Attendant Officer had said that once they dug up the grain, they would put rice on to boil into congee at once. Some people, if they did not eat grain soon, might not hold out much longer.

They pounded the ground with clubs, smashed the walls with axes — starving people will do anything. At last, with a cry of startled delight, they actually did find a cellar!

But when they rushed in, hearts pounding, they found it held mostly silks, embroidered cloth, and lacquerware. Grain? Not a single grain!

The silks were exquisite, but in a famine year, what use were such things? Liu Xiaqing, enraged, threw them into the fire and burned them like straw.

"Dig! Keep digging!"

Liu Xiaqing would not give up. He had men pry up the flagstones in the courtyard and dig a dozen pits. They even hollowed out the pigsty, yet not a trace of grain was found. The crowd had labored the whole day for nothing and could only slump on the ground, utterly dejected.

How many of the Red Eyebrows' old, weak, women, and children were waiting outside the manor with desperate eyes. Their faces were parched, their eyes sunken into two hollows, their cheeks caved into two pits, their skin like a sheet of white paper pasted over bone. What grain there was to eat had mostly been taken away by the able-bodied men who had gone west to fight. This month, no one knew how they had survived it. They had waited with desperate hope for congee, only to find it had all been for nothing.

"Bring the man forward!"

Liu Xiaqing, furious and frustrated, had a half-grown boy, bound hand and foot, shoved forward, tied to a post, and struck with a raised hand.

This was the Zhao family's second son, named Zhao Li, about the same age as Liu Penzi, also sallow and emaciated, looking sickly and listless.

"The grain! Where is it?"

"I don't know, I don't know, there's no grain left." Zhao Li was terrified, but Liu Xiaqing, looking at the starving crowd outside, had lost all patience.

"If you won't talk, then we'll boil you alive!"

Liu Penzi stared dumbstruck, but Liu Xiaqing kicked him: "Go stoke the fire!"

The stoves had been set up outside the manor early on, with huge, crude pottery cauldrons atop them. The water inside was boiling fiercely, the heat scalding Liu Penzi's cheeks.

Liu Xiaqing had only meant to frighten Zhao Li into confessing where the grain was, but quite a few Red Eyebrows, hearing this, genuinely perked up, some even licking their cracked lips.

"General, spare his life."

The speaker was not Zhao Li. The voice rose from outside the crowd. A man in tattered clothes stepped forward of his own accord — it was the Zhao family's eldest son, Zhao Xiao, courtesy name Changping, who had been hiding among the common folk all along.

He and his younger brother had been hiding in the marshes. The day before, he had gone out to search for food, and only upon returning to their hiding place did he discover his brother had been seized. So with disheveled hair and a grimy face, disguised as a beggar, he had come to gather news, never expecting to see such a scene amid his own family's broken walls.

"Son of the Zhao family — I've searched for you a long time. You've finally shown yourself."

Liu Xiaqing seized Zhao Xiao and slapped him twice, crack, crack — the blows were heavy, drawing blood from his nose — then held a knife edge close to his eyes: "Speak. Where is your family's grain hidden?"

"There is no surplus grain left." Zhao Xiao raised his head in indignation. "There was famine last year already. My father had died at Chengchang, so I distributed the grain to the starving in the county. What remained was taken away by the General and his men. Not a single grain remains."

"We had hoped to plant some winter wheat, but…"

But in winter the Red Eyebrows had swept in, and chaos reigned north of the Huai. Who had the mind to farm? On top of that, no snow fell all winter, so the already scant wheat fields yielded almost nothing. Now they were sparse and patchy; even in two more months, the harvest would not match the seed sown.

"You whelp, still trying to run your mouth!"

Liu Xiaqing flew into a rage: "Boil Zhao Li alive!"

"Do not eat my younger brother!"

Zhao Xiao, thinking the Red Eyebrows were so starved they would eat anything, clung desperately to Liu Xiaqing's leg and said: "My younger brother is ill, and his body is very thin and weak. His flesh surely tastes terrible. If you must eat someone, eat me!"

His face streaming with tears, Zhao Xiao bared his own arm and said: "I am strong and healthy, free of illness. I will surely taste better than my younger brother."

Liu Xiaqing and the others were all stunned. None had imagined there could be anyone in the world so willing to go to his death. They looked at each other in shock.

"Do not eat my elder brother!"

But Zhao Li also wailed: "It was I who was careless and got caught. To be eaten by you is my fate. But what crime has my elder brother committed?"

For a moment, the brothers embraced, each urging the other to let himself die, until in their desperation they could only sob, unable to form words.

The sight left the Red Eyebrows deeply unsettled, and Huan Tan seized the moment to step in and remonstrate.

"Men of such filial and fraternal virtue — does the Attendant Officer truly mean to kill them?"

Liu Xiaqing knew by now that the Zhao family truly had no surplus grain left. With Huan Tan's persuasion, he could only relent resentfully, throwing the two brothers into the army's prisoner-of-war camp to do hard labor alongside Huan Tan, Liu Penzi, and the others, all the while cursing and grumbling to save face.

"I was only trying to frighten you."

"The Giant Fan has declared: even if the Red Eyebrows starve to death, we will not eat one another!"

…

Yet whether such human tragedies would come to pass or not was not for anyone's words to decide.

The Red Eyebrows left in Pei still numbered over a hundred thousand, mostly the old, the weak, women, and children. The grain was gone — there was not even congee to be had.

So Huan Tan, Liu Penzi, Zhao Xiao, and these former members of the elite could only follow the Red Eyebrows in eating chaff. They roasted old millet husks, pounded them fine, dug up kudzu root, chopped and ground it into powder, mixed them together and boiled a paste to drink — you had to gulp it down; some plant roots were so bitter that small mouthfuls were impossible to swallow.

Others stripped the bark off elm trees, as though peeling the clothes off a rich man, cut it into small chunks, dried it, then ground it into powder to boil soup. That soup was wonderfully tasty, thick and sticky. Let it cool and you could slurp it down — a whole bowl of soup gone in a single gulp.

Liu Penzi learned to dig wild greens and pick lichen. It was a blessing it was summer; after just one rainfall, the hillsides were covered in lush green plants. Those who knew the species could pick out the edible ones from a mass of weeds, but Liu Penzi and the others had no such knowledge and could only dig blindly, as if cutting fodder for cattle — the cattle were all gone, either slaughtered for meat or carrying baggage with the main Red Eyebrow force on their western campaign.

There were many out digging wild greens. Some were so famished they would pluck a weed and stuff it straight into their mouths, chewing until their teeth turned green. To Liu Penzi, they seemed like herds of cattle and sheep driven onto green pasture to graze, left with nothing but the instinct to eat.

There were also plenty who died from eating poisonous plants by mistake. Liu Penzi and the Zhao brothers went to collect the bodies. He noticed that these people did not look tormented in death — they were always smiling. Only later did he understand: to die at such a time was actually a stroke of luck, for they would no longer have to endure the more agonizing pangs of an empty stomach.

When the wild greens were gnawed bare and new ones had no time to grow, when the tree bark in the woods was stripped clean, more desperate things began to happen.

Some, mad with hunger, gnawed on rotten wood, stuffing wood shavings along with wood-boring grubs into their mouths and chewing.

Others ate earth. What could be eaten was the stuff later ages would call "kaolin clay."

In the hardest days, Liu Penzi gave what safe food there was to Huan Tan, who was vomiting and suffering diarrhea after eating poisonous greens by mistake, sick to the point of death. He himself tried eating earth. It was terribly hard to swallow, like chewing sand.

"Isn't earth just sand?" Zhao Xiao swallowed it alongside him. He gave most of what was edible to his younger brother and also looked after Huan Tan fairly well. Years ago, Zhao Xiao had been recommended as Filial and Incorrupt and made a court gentleman, and had once met Huan Tan briefly in Chang'an.

Swallowing earth could ease the hunger, but the misery came afterward. The belly swelled unbearably, yet you could squat for an hour and still not pass a thing. Half a month later, one after another, people began to die of abdominal swelling.

Liu Penzi grew afraid. He could only lie prone on a rock and let the brothers Zhao Xiao and Zhao Li use chopsticks to dig the dung pellets out of him. The pain made him squeal like a stuck pig, and the blood stained Zhao Xiao's hands red.

Liu Penzi wept uncontrollably. When his elder brother had still been alive, even herding cattle in the Red Eyebrow Army, he had never suffered such an indignity. Sobbing, he swore he would never eat earth again — he would rather starve to death than eat it.

He was far from alone in thinking this way. In recent days, incidents of corpse theft had begun cropping up one after another — bodies that had been buried earlier were dug up. These people, starved to death until they were nothing but skin and bones, had the flesh scraped from them with blunt implements, leaving stark white skeletons exposed.

Liu Xiaqing was furious. Bandits out in the wilds could do that, but the Red Eyebrows could not. He even seized a few of the corpse robbers. Those men were deeply aggrieved: "The dead tossed into the ravines — aren't they just torn apart by dogs and gnawed by wolves the same way? Rather than let beasts have them, why can't people eat them!"

"People are not birds and beasts!" Liu Xiaqing cursed and executed several men, but it was utterly useless. The corpse theft grew worse and worse, until finally, even the eating of the living began…

One day, Liu Penzi and Zhao Li went out as usual to search for wild greens. Passing by a hut, Zhao Li said he smelled something fragrant.

Following the scent, he came to a hut. Steam was seeping out through the crack of the door. He pushed the door open but saw no one — only a stove burning, something boiling inside a pottery cauldron, bubbling and gurgling. Inside, the window shutters were tightly closed, and the aroma of meat filled the air.

Probably wild dog or wolf, right? They knew the person living here was a lame local hunter, who could often catch a few birds and the like. Occasionally, taking pity on them as people from wealthy families fallen to this state, he would give them a few sparrow legs. Liu Penzi could suck on one in his mouth for an entire day. The old hunter would watch them and smile, his gaze strange.

Liu Penzi had been eating dirt for days now and was ravenous. He walked over, wanting to drink a mouthful of the broth — this didn't count as stealing.

But Zhao Li grabbed him tightly, his eyes full of terror as he pointed at the water vat inside the room!

It was a human topknot, a whole piece draped over the lid of the water vat. Liu Penzi was so faint with hunger that his head swam; he thought someone was hiding behind the vat playing a joke on them. He walked over to look — behind the vat was completely empty! But that topknot was stained with blood! Fresh blood!

He instantly broke out in a cold sweat, his legs going weak. And at that moment, through another door to the kitchen came the limping figure of the hunter, asking them why they were here.

Not only was his forehead smeared with the red of the Red Eyebrows, but his eyes were red too, glistening and wet with a bright gleam.

"Ah, it's the young lads."

The old hunter's gaze did not look at their faces, but at their arms, legs, bellies — just like he was looking at two little sparrows trembling with fear. His manner was still quite kindly. He reached out a hand stained with blood, as if to touch Liu Penzi's topknot.

"Hungry, are you? I've got meat here. Will you two eat?"

…

Liu Penzi and Zhao Li fled stumbling and crawling. When the Red Eyebrow Attendant Liu Xiaqing learned of this, he was so furious that smoke poured from his every orifice. He immediately took men to the hunter's door and seized him. Only then did they discover that he had used dried bird legs to lure a child with no father or mother, killed him, and eaten his flesh.

The old hunter was publicly executed, but before he died, his eyes still red, he cursed furiously: "In the past, everything in Pei was fine. Even in famine years, you could strip bark to eat. Until you lot came here — then the heavens dried up, the land went barren, even grass roots and tree bark were eaten clean, and the birds and beasts fled. It's not that I wanted to eat people — it's you who forced me to eat people!"

As soon as he finished speaking, his head was hacked off by Liu Xiaqing wielding an axe. Liu Xiaqing then proclaimed that from then on, anyone who ate human flesh would be killed without pardon.

"What he said was right."

Zhao Xiao, bringing Liu Penzi and Zhao Li to watch this scene, only said: "The local people have all been driven to death by the Red Eyebrows."

"Though the Red Eyebrow Elders and Attendants themselves have not personally eaten human flesh, they are the chief culprits who caused the great famine in Pei. When the wilds are strewn with the starved dead, it is leading beasts to devour men!"

"Master Huan said that the Red Eyebrows believe you Liu clan imperial kinsmen and great houses like my family are all fat rats."

Zhao Xiao's gaze toward the Red Eyebrows was filled with bitter hatred — the hatred of a murdered father and a ruined family: "Then those people are even more hateful locusts! The human calamity they've caused is tenfold, a hundredfold worse than before!"

But hate as they might, they still did not break away from the Red Eyebrows to flee elsewhere. For the Zhao brothers had once gone to the borderlands controlled by the Red Eyebrows — there, order had utterly collapsed, bandits ran rampant, and cannibalism or exchanging children to eat were commonplace sights.

Yet if this continued, the people of Pei would likely all starve to death. The Red Eyebrow Attendants were already discussing: if there was truly no other way, they would go to the Huai River to try their luck. The two powers in Huainan — Li Xian, King of Huainan, and Liu Xiu, King of Wu — had both sent ships to blockade the waters, blocking the Red Eyebrows from moving south. Perhaps they could find boats to cross?

But whether they, a crowd of the old, weak, sick, and crippled, could defeat the southern regimes was also a question.

Fortunately, just at this moment, news of victory came from the west: "Runan has been taken by the Giant Fan!"

"The Greenwood has suffered a great defeat and withdrawn to Nanyang!"

"We can go to Runan to find food!"

Cheers rang out in waves. Though perhaps fewer than half of them would make it there, the rest likely collapsing dead along the way, it at last gave them a sliver of hope.

And Liu Penzi was also about to part from Huan Tan.

Huan Tan had been ill for over half a month and was utterly unable to travel far. The returning Red Eyebrows, having received bribes and entreaties from Liu Penzi's elder brother, were going to take him west.

This time the Red Eyebrow Army would abandon the prisoner camp. The brothers Zhao Xiao and Zhao Li were also released — in truth, they were left behind in Pei, now emptied of everything, to await death.

"I will find a way to get to Huainan." Zhao Xiao promised Liu Penzi: "I hear that under the King of Wu's rule there is considerable order. The Huai River fleet only blocks the Red Eyebrow Army, not the refugees. I will also try to find a cart or boat to bring Master Huan along — he saved my brothers' lives!"

Liu Penzi nodded, and could only grasp Huan Tan's hunched hand to bid him farewell.

"Master, your disciple must go now."

Though gravely ill, Huan Tan still had some awareness. He merely nodded slightly and reached out to touch Liu Penzi's topknot.

The door creaked. Liu Penzi left with the Red Eyebrow Army. The gaunt, emaciated faces of the Red Eyebrows' old, weak, women, and children held a hope for survival, but more than that, bewilderment.

"Fat rats, fat rats, eat not our millet. Three years we've served you, yet you pay us no heed. We shall leave you and go to that happy land. Happy land, happy land — there we shall find our place…"

The common folk of the Spring and Autumn era only vented their anger in poems, but the Red Eyebrows went a step further — they truly rid themselves of the "fat rats."

Yet after beating to death the fat rats of their homeland, they did not usher in the good days they had imagined. They could only migrate, flee, and roam. Never able to put down roots, they fought their way across several provinces, sweeping all before them. Though they beat the fat rats to death in one place after another, they themselves became "locust bandits" — more hated by the locals than the fat rats, and causing even greater tragedies!

In the end, after the Red Eyebrows had devoured one place clean, they were forced to move on again. So it was with Pei; and Runan, just taken, and Nanyang, which they might go to in the future — how could it be any different?

"Going back and forth like this, there is no future at all."

Huan Tan merely closed his eyes: "The Red Eyebrows wish to fight their way across the realm in search of a happy land."

"Little do they know, they are driving south while pointing their chariot north — getting further and further from that happy land, that happy country!"

…

PS: Chapter 2 at 23:00.