Chapter 14: Bai Yingzi

The black smoke over the village thickened. The carbonized beams of the houses at the edge finally gave way under the weight of the heavy roof — tiles and bricks crashed down with a clatter.

Inside the earthen walls, the cooking smoke had already died out.

Well-fed idlers gathered in small groups outside the earthen walls, cradling their bellies as they patrolled the courtyards littered with corpses.

Leisurely and content, they tapped here and knocked there, trying to squeeze the last bit of valuables from a village long drained of life, so they could return fully laden.

Seventeen wooden carts stood at the gate of the earthen walls. Once they had been ox carts, horse carts, donkey carts — now the oxen, horses, donkeys, and mules were nowhere to be seen; every one of them had become a man-drawn cart.

The hemp sacks hoisted onto the carts were heavy and bulging; the wheels pressed deep ruts into the yellow earth.

The bandit chief called Bai Yingzi walked out of the earthen walls, frowning as he looked up at the daylight. The loose skin on his dark, weathered face creased into deep furrows. "The smoke's been burning an hour. Drag the bodies to the roadside and tidy up. We're moving out."

He clapped his hands, hitched up his trousers, and limped forward two steps. Lifting a leg, he stepped over a barefoot corpse, then turned back to identify it. He crouched down, reached back and grabbed the face of that deserter who had died with eyes still open, held the jaw and studied it carefully, then pushed it aside and bared his teeth in a grin.

Bai Yingzi no longer knew whether this was his fifth or sixth year as an outlaw — just as he no longer knew how many people he had killed. He had lost count of both.

He only knew that in the last two years, life had truly been getting smoother and smoother.

In the early days, he had been less than a farmer in Suide County — a mere day laborer. You couldn't even say his home was bare walls; he had no home at all, only a donkey shed.

But in his youth, Bai Yingzi had been known throughout the surrounding villages as an honest, strong young man. Whenever anyone needed muscle, they sought him out for odd jobs.

Later, he married a good wife from Mizhi. She was pretty and hardworking, and even life itself seemed less grueling.

Their circumstances improved bit by bit. The first year after marriage, they bought an ox and rented fifty mu of land. The young couple was willing to pour deadly toil into the fields, and the landlord was pleased to see it.

In their third year of marriage, they had their own land, added a son and a daughter to the family, and finally built a new cave dwelling. Pigs and sheep went into their pens, chickens and rabbits shared a coop — life blazed red-hot like the potted chili peppers grown in the magistrate's yamen courtyard.

The day he moved into the new cave dwelling, Bai Yingzi tossed and turned. It was the first time in his life he had ever slept in a bed, and no matter how he lay, it felt wrong.

He lay awake until dawn, his mind filled entirely with his wife saying they needed to save money — save money to send the children to community school to study and sit for the county exam someday.

In his heart, he was utterly unwilling. After all the struggle, they finally had a little money left at year's end, and at last, during festivals, they could bear to eat a few bites of meat — and now they had to save for the children's future schoolmaster fees?

Besides, damn it all, who knew if the little ancestors were even the sort to study and pass the county exam? The man who raised horses for the landlord had also attended school for half a year as a child — what good did it do him? He was still raising horses.

He was a dog of a man — could he really sire a county scholar?

That was what he thought.

When he craved meat, he would secretly smack the kids' bottoms a couple of times while they were too young to remember, but Bai Yingzi still followed his wife's wishes and saved the money.

Several years passed like this, and just as life was getting better and better, drought struck northern Shaanxi.

A drought does not stir trouble on its own — what stirs trouble is the hungry people under the drought. Everywhere in Yan'an Prefecture, societies and sects rose up. The White Lotus Sect and the Luo Sect emerged under the guises of the Loyal and Brave Society, the Loyal and Righteous Fellowship, and the Shared Hatred Society, killing everywhere.

Bai Yingzi dared not travel the official roads. The wheat shoots in the fields withered in vast swaths. The cloth his wife wove could not be sold, yet they dared not fall behind on the imperial taxes.

The grain tax chief stood outside the door, fierce as a demon. Inside, husband and wife clung to each other and wept bitterly. After weeping, they sold the old ox — the grain tax had to be paid.

Later, he heard that the taxes actually could be deferred. It was just that there were two kinds of taxes: one kind the local authorities collected to hand over to the Emperor — if you spoke nicely to the runners, that one could be deferred.

The other kind was local levies. The runners' salaries came out of this one, so if you deferred it, they would be the first to refuse.

Bai Yingzi was full of regret. Had he known, he wouldn't have had to sell the old ox. Without an ox, he couldn't rent land.

The next year, having learned his lesson, he didn't pay the portion meant for the Emperor, but even the remainder forced him to sell the family land to pay the levies.

The third year, Heaven took pity and the drought ended.

But Bai Yingzi had no land left either — whether his own land or rented land, it was all gone.

When the poll tax came due again, there was nothing left in the house worth selling, and at last, they touched the schoolmaster money saved for the children.

He told his wife not to grieve, said their family simply didn't have the fate to produce a county scholar. He accepted it.

But even if he accepted his fate, fate would not let him go.

Life seemed to be a cycle. He went back to working as a day laborer, scraping together money to feed himself, buying an ox, renting fifty mu of land, buying one mu of land, then another mu. The county levies had to be paid; the court's twice-yearly taxes had to be deferred.

In the forty-sixth year of Wanli, the court went to war and raised taxes by three li five hao per mu. In the forty-seventh year of Wanli, the court raised taxes by another three li five hao per mu. In the forty-eighth year of Wanli, the court raised taxes by another two li per mu — a total increase of nine li per mu.

Truth be told, compared to the grain yield per mu, paying nine li of silver was not much. Truly, not much at all.

What was much was that nine li after the crop failure, in northern Shaanxi, under years of relentless drought.

Later, in the Tianqi era, the drought came again.

Everyone gritted their teeth to survive. The military households of Suide Garrison grew fewer and fewer, and the bandits in the mountains grew more and more.

First, household after household ran out of grain stores. Then, people mad with hunger gathered in small gangs and mobs of hundreds to rob travelers and raid the homes of the rich. Soon, even the rich households outside the city had nothing left to eat.

People mixed wild grasses from the hills, bark from the roadside, and white stone powder, kneaded them into cakes, and steamed them to eat. But this could not sustain them for long.

By this time, there were no bandits anymore — everyone was a potential bandit.

That year, Bai Yingzi had no options left. He owed the officials several years of back taxes, plus a year of levies. And because he was built strong and powerful — whether out of fear or because he seemed an easy target — he became the chicken in the story of killing the chicken to scare the monkeys.

The tax-collector brothers who had been easy to talk to in past years were nowhere to be seen. The runners seized him and took him to the yamen. Before the eyes of over a hundred tax-delinquent commoners, they used the awe-inspiring cudgel to break his left leg. To save his right leg, he gritted his teeth and borrowed from a loan shark.

Bai Yingzi was crippled. His wife had no land and no ox, and could not hold the family together. Public order was crumbling. Their eldest daughter ran out and simply vanished. To feed their son, his wife sold herself for three dou of millet. Bai Yingzi became a beggar.

Later, his good wife — ah, his good wife was found by a fellow beggar, lying in the dry trench of the city moat outside the walls, naked, not even wrapped in a reed mat.

Driven mad with desperation, Bai Yingzi went to demand an explanation, but he was a beggar — the household servants would not even let him through the gate.

After much roundabout inquiry, he learned that his wife had stolen a steamed bun from her master's house, wanting to take it outside to feed their child. She had been discovered and tortured to death.

The one child they had left did not starve to death — Bai Yingzi strangled the child with his own hands, saying it was better than living in misery.

Afterward, the runner who had broken his leg was strangled in the latrine while relieving himself. The young master of the household that had bought his wife was dashed to death against a rockery. The head cook's skull was stuffed into the stove. The old master was tied up and thrown into a heap of corpses outside the city, where he was literally frightened to death.

The crippled Bai Yingzi took to the wilds and became a bandit, robbing merchants and killing travelers. With no martial skills to rely on and no military background, he was beaten by the authorities from Suide to Qingjian, from Qingjian driven into the mountains. Wherever he went, he left shattered homes and exterminated families, leaving no one alive.

He observed no code of honor, nor did he rob the rich to aid the poor. If he ran into the rich, he killed them; if he ran into the poor, he killed them too. Stumbling along for several years, he gained capable men to assist him, and in Suide Prefecture, through arson and plunder, he carved out a fearsome and notorious name.

Now, Bai Yingzi's bandit lair was far more organized. Though he still had no idea how many men he commanded — sometimes many, sometimes few, all depending on the harvest.

When the harvest was good, the bandits on the mountain returned to their hometowns to farm. When the harvest was bad, the common folk came up the mountain to join the stronghold, where they also cleared land and planted vegetables. In ordinary times, they were no different from common folk.

Only when the common folk below the mountain sent word did the farmers of the stronghold lay down their hoes, take up blades and clubs, and sweep down the mountain on a great raid.

In the past, such a loosely organized bandit lair would not have survived the year. But now, with the court's local control collapsing day by day, commoners were leaving their homes in droves to become refugees, and the authorities were powerless to stop them — let alone provide defense and security for those who still remained in their villages.

In times like these, the only ones with the leisure to provoke the mountain bandits were other mountain bandits.

In truth, Cao Yao had guessed right. Bai Yingzi had indeed earlier followed the great army that Wang Zuogua had assembled and marched south. It was not that he wanted to join the rebel forces — it was simply that Wang Zuogua brooked no argument whatsoever. His massive host swept through and swept them along, and a minor bandit chief like him had no chance to refuse at all.

Bai Yingzi gave the order to prepare to move out, and several trusted squad leaders crowded up to him: "Boss, are we heading south, or… back north?"

"South my ass — the Left-Hanger's already killed the Army Supervisor. You wanna go south and get yourselves killed? That crappy wood's useless anyway, we don't owe him a thing." Bai Yingzi waved his hand dismissively. "Haul the grain carts and head back to Suide."

Hearing this, the squad leaders on both sides showed delight on their faces, but couldn't help worrying too. Someone asked, "What if the Left-Hanger comes back to strike us?"

"Come back?" Bai Yingzi's shoulders shook as he let out a cold laugh. "Around Xi'an Prefecture, the court won't let him run wild. That boy most likely ain't coming back at all… Contact!"

Following his gaze, through the still-burning houses at the village's west end, a unit of troops in crimson armor, helmet plumes erect, bearing blades, shields, bows and spears, advanced in a double-dragon-out-of-water two-column formation. Before they even arrived, over ten sharp arrows shot forth from their ranks, picking off the bandits who turned to flee, one after another.

"Government troops! The government troops are here!"

On the hill ridge, a red flag showing half its face waved, and even the bandit chief Bai Yingzi lost all will to resist. Shouting orders to his men to push the grain carts, he commanded a retreat eastward.