Chapter 30: Journey

The last afterglow of the setting sun vanished beyond the horizon, and a pigeon-gray dusk spilled into the desolate river valley.

The brim of his helmet, stripped of its small banner, pressed down low, and the red-padded iron armor of the border troops wrapped the grim, brawny man so tightly not a breath of air could pass.

Gao Xian leaned against the cart and set a cowhide waterskin adorned with bell ornaments down on the cart shaft, then broke off pieces of scallion flatbread and placed them slowly into his mouth, as if savoring the flavor.

A few paces away, Liu Chengzong, similarly armored, walked back from the riverbank, set the water bucket he carried onto the cart, and said irritably, "Damn bad luck. There's a dead man on the opposite bank."

Gao Xian said nothing, only silently took a huge bite of his flatbread, his left hand reaching down to hook the wrist cord of his saber hilt onto his belt.

"Don't mind me, you go on savoring it. He's been soaking in the water so long he's about to burst. Face-up, so it's a man. Probably three to five days ago. No one around."

Corpses in water follow a pattern — men have less fat in their buttocks, so they float face-up; women float the other way, face-down.

Having said this, Liu Chengzong clapped Gao Xian on the shoulder, then took a flatbread wrapped in hemp cloth and oiled paper from the cart himself, ate as he walked with furrowed brows, and crouched down a few paces away, sighing to Yang Dingrui, who was building a campfire with cobblestones and dead branches.

"Sir, is Ansai County really this chaotic?"

Chaotic wasn't quite the word. They had already traveled forty li, and the shallow little river beside them was called Mudan Stream, only twenty or thirty li from Ansai.

After all, they were on the border of Fushi, Anding, and Ansai counties — even in peacetime, bandits robbing and killing travelers or smuggling goods in the borderlands happened from time to time.

But in Ansai, people eating one another had already begun.

Yang Dingrui said that his previous trip back to Ansai had been on official business, accompanying his tongnian, the Investigating Censor Ma Maocai dispatched by the emperor to Shaanxi, to investigate the famine conditions in the various counties.

They hadn't even been able to enter the city — at Sanlipu outside the city walls, a surging crowd rushed at them demanding grain. They had no grain either, and the people wanted to kill his horse. Yang Dingrui, terrified, shot and wounded one man with his bow.

But what he never expected was that after he wounded that one man, the crowd, seeing he was too difficult to deal with, stopped chasing him — and immediately killed and dragged away the man he had just shot.

By the campfire, Yang Dingrui raised his head to look toward the riverbank. The corpse Liu Chengzong had mentioned was beyond his range of sight. In the end, he only sighed soundlessly. "Too many have starved to death. The county magistrate had no other choice. To prevent a great plague, he could only dig several great pits outside the city to hold the corpses, each pit holding two or three hundred.

When I went back, three of those great pits were already full. Ansai is a small county — no more than two thousand households in the whole county, no more than twenty thousand mouths. With things like that outside the city, Lion, nothing you imagine would surprise me."

Sitting cross-legged on the ground, Liu Chengzong pushed up his helmet brim and rubbed his forehead with the very tip of his thumbnail, thinking: I really should have brought two more men.

He said, "When we get close to the city, we'll have to hide the cart."

Yang Dingrui nodded at once. "Having you accompany me was precisely for peace of mind — not to kill. If we can avoid killing, it's best not to kill."

In truth, the change in Liu Chengzong was so great that even Yang Dingrui, who hadn't seen him in years, felt a shock in his heart.

The child who once followed behind him climbing mountains was now fully armored, carrying a war bow to exterminate mountain bandits and face off against Mongol raiders — clearly a man long accustomed to life and death.

"The officials — a matter this big..."

Dead branches crackled crisply in the campfire. Liu Chengzong dragged over a door plank he had picked up from an abandoned cave dwelling along the road and stood it up beside them to block the wind, then asked, "Why aren't the officials providing disaster relief?"

"Disaster relief isn't something you provide just by saying so, especially a disaster of this magnitude. A single county or prefecture alone lacks the strength to provide relief. First the locality must report upward, then the court dispatches envoys to assess the severity of the disaster, the envoys return to court to verify and allocate funds, and only then are capable officials sent out with money to provide relief."

Yang Dingrui said, "My official business here, accompanying the envoy, is precisely to assess the severity of the disaster."

"The disaster in our Qin land should have been reported last year, but the governor and grand coordinator delayed it. Ever since the routed troops from Sarhu poured into Qin, the grand coordinators of Shaanxi and Yansui at the time were both useless cowards — each had ability, but one was greedy for wealth beyond all reckoning, and the other knew only to build the Three Great Halls for the court. Mountain bandits and roving bandits appear every year; famine refugees and displaced people are constantly on the move. From the court above down to the localities below, the purge of the Wei faction is raging like wildfire, and vacant official posts are beyond counting."

"The chief officials are all southerners by registration, with no connection to the local region; the local deputy officials are mostly from great hereditary bureaucratic clans — they travel by sedan chair and ascend the tribunal to act as officials, seeing more documents than common people. The petty clerks do know the disaster situation, but recent circumstances are not what they once were."

"In seven years, three emperors have ascended the throne. This year Eunuch Wei grips the state, next year the various sons of the Donglin hold power. Five times over, everyone from county magistrates to territorial grand ministers has been replaced wholesale. The petty clerks don't know which chief official dares to act, and even if they knew one dared to act, they wouldn't dare have the slightest connection to him."

He shook his head. "What's more, the border garrisons of Shaanxi's three defense commands have their pay in arrears, and the tax-farming debts in Qin are impossible to avoid — all dead knots that cannot be untied."

"When the border troops are owed pay, military morale wavers; when military morale wavers, it's hard to guard against the barbarian raiders — that's the external threat. When tax-farming debts go unpaid, the court presses for tax collection; when the court presses for tax collection, the people scatter in all directions — that's the internal threat."

"Once a problem appears, the locality cannot control itself. Shaanxi does not regard northern Shaanxi as the whole of Shaanxi; the court does not regard Shaanxi as the whole realm. Then the land of Qin will be ruined, and all under heaven will be in peril."

The sky had gone completely black. The cart not far from the campfire was only a silhouette in the darkness.

A bone-piercing night wind blew, and Yang Dingrui tightened his clothes. Seeming to feel that his description of the situation had grown too grim, he smiled in self-reassurance and bowed with clasped hands toward the east. "Fortunately, His Majesty is sagely and wise. Knowing of this matter, he dispatched an envoy down. I estimate that in three months at the latest, the court will have a plan for disaster relief."

Three months?

Liu Chengzong felt doubtful about this. If it were as simple as Yang Dingrui said, then why, in that other set of memories, had the Great Ming been destroyed by peasant armies?

He felt Yang Dingrui was saying this just to fob him off.

"If it's only three months, sir, why did you resign your post?"

"Don't say three months — I couldn't even wait half a month."

Yang Dingrui shook his head. "I am a court-appointed official, and moreover a husband and a father. My wife and children are all inside Ansai city. If they didn't tell me something major had happened in Ansai, I wouldn't know. But I went and saw for myself — it's that close to Ansai. How could I still go back to the prefectural seat and sit in the tribunal?

If the affairs of the world are to be ruined, one more Yang Dingrui is useless; if the affairs of the world are to be mended, one less Yang Dingrui makes no difference.

I hold official rank — I could rescue my wife and children, but I cannot dispatch government troops. If I returned to my hometown alone and was killed by someone, the local authorities would certainly charge the disaster victims with rebellion, and even more people would die because of it. Better to resign and be free of all burdens. If I can return home and rescue my wife and children, that would be best."

He nodded gently. "If I can't rescue them, then I'll just die together with them. It's nothing more than fate being so. That's all."

The night by the banks of Mudan Stream was tranquil. Only here, in a night like this, could one be fortunate enough to hear the chirping of insects in spring.

Liu Chengzong's thoughts, too, drifted far to the east amid Yang Dingrui's words of relief — toward that distant Forbidden City he had never visited, yet which was extraordinarily vivid in memories that did not belong to this era.

He felt a deep sorrow — sorrow that the young emperor imprisoned within the palace, nominally ruling all under heaven, had no idea what was happening in the lands he ruled.

He also felt very fortunate for that emperor with the reign title Chongzhen — fortunate that the emperor did not possess his own gift of knowing what was to come, for otherwise he might have gone to meet his ancestors at the old crooked-neck tree behind the hill on the very first day of his ascension.

At that moment, the jinshi beside him said, "If things go badly in Ansai, you need not concern yourselves with me. With horses and armor, breaking through a siege should not be difficult."

Turning his head back, Liu Chengzong nodded very seriously. "Rest assured."

"Once we pick up the family, by this time the day after tomorrow, we'll be eating at home."

"The Stubborn Bandit" originates from: