CHAPTER 2

 

CHAPTER 2 THE GENERAL’S DISCARD

A Blind Eye Cast Upon the Scholar’s Vow;

A Ragtag Guard Assigned to a Suicidal March.

Jiuquan Commandery, the western end of the Hexi Corridor.

The sixth month of the sixteenth year of Yongping. (73 CE.)

Three months and eleven hundred li to reach a man who would not look up from a melon.

The grey had finally washed out of his fingers, and he had not thought he would mind it. He minded. Somewhere east of the Yellow River bend the sun and the salt pans had scoured his hands back to plain skin, a stranger's hands, and now he kept turning them over at the odd moment the way the tongue keeps going to a tooth that used to ache.

He had walked most of it. The mule gave out two days east of the river, a grey jenny his mother's parting silver had bought him in Chang'an, and he had named her Vermilion, for a joke his brother Ban Gu would have caught and no one out here would. She knelt down in the gravel and would not get up, and that was the end of Vermilion. He carried the pack after that. Three pairs of sandals since Luoyang. The strap on the first had gone in the archive doorway on his way out, and he had taken it at the time for a sign. It had been a sign that he needed better sandals.

Now he stood in the front chamber of the general's tent and waited to be priced.

General Dou Gu's tent was not a soldier's tent. It was a house that moved, felt and lacquer, hung with maps painted on stretched hide, lit at midday by lamps of clean beeswax that did not stink of mutton. The whole northern army had ridden out of here in the spring to break the Northern Xiongnu, thirty thousand horse pushed up past the reed shallows of Lake Barkol, and it had come home fat and easy and sure. Ban Chao had heard the song at every well from the Wei valley out: how Dou Gu chased the Chanyu's riders over the Tianshan and set a Han garrison down at Yiwu, the melon oasis, where no Han banner had stood in sixty years. The corridor was drunk on it. He had come to drink from the same cup and was beginning to see that no one meant to pour him one.

"The academician. From the Orchid Terrace." The aide who lifted the flap said the word the way you name a rash. "One cup of tea. The general said don't stretch it."

Dou Gu did not get up. A broad man gone soft at the jaw, cousin to the Empress by blood and a general by the same, he sat among his maps and peeled a Yiwu melon with a jade-handled knife, laying the rind into a lacquer dish in one long green ribbon that did not break. He looked at Ban Chao the way a horse-dealer looks at a plough-ox that has strayed into the cavalry lines.

"Ban Biao's boy," he said. Not asking. "Ban Gu's little brother. The one who does the salt tallies."

"I was that man. I broke my brush and walked here to ask for the war."

"You walked." The knife kept going. "That is more than most who come to me for a commission. They ride in, then ask me to feed the horse." He set down a curl of rind. "And what would an archivist do in a war? Copy the death-rolls? A Ban hand would look very well at the head of the list of my dead."

Behind him a secretary made a small wet sound of a laugh. Ban Chao let it go through him and leave nothing. Thirty years among men who laughed at him low in the throat had grown him a hide for it, thick as saddle leather.

"You crossed the Tianshan and you took Yiwu," he said. "The corridor sings it at every well. But you did not take the West, General. You put your hand on the door of it and came home."

The knife stopped.

The tent went quiet. The secretary's smile slid off and hit the ground somewhere. For the first time the general's eyes came up out of the soft flesh, small and clever, and settled on the burnt scholar in the bone-white robe.

"Say it again," Dou Gu said, and he said it softly. "Slowly. It may be the last long thing you get to say standing up."

"You broke the Chanyu in the field. A broken army is not a broken empire." The old flood was up in him now, the same one that had put his stool over in Luoyang, and he could no more dam it than a sneeze. "Past the Jade Gate there are thirty kingdoms and more, Shanshan, Kucha, Kashgar, Khotan, oases strung down the sand like beads on a wet cord. Every one of them buys its life twice. Once off us. Once off the Xiongnu, whose horse are three days the nearer. While those kings pay north, the north eats. Burn the Chanyu's grass to the root and Khotan's tax and Kucha's horses still fill his belly by autumn. You cut the wolf, General. You did not cut its throat. Its throat is out there." He put his hand at the felt wall, west, past two hundred li of nothing. "In the sand."

Dou Gu looked at him a while. Then he laughed, and it was not the secretary's laugh. Low. Tired. Something in it close to respect and not glad to be there.

"The court has argued that line a hundred years," he said. "Great ministers. Bronze seals. Men who have never been thirsty. You know what they settle on, every time? That the West is a lovely bottomless well. Pour armies down it, they sink, they are gone. The first Emperor of the restored Han shut the Jade Gate sooner than pay that road. And now a clerk with a dead mule and one clean sentence walks in to open the account again." He shook his head. "You have the eye. I will give you the eye. Eyes are cheap. I have thirty thousand men who can see a desert. What I do not have is one I would throw into it."

"Then throw one already spent."

That went in somewhere too. The general studied him, the knife idle.

"You know what you are asking to be," he said. "Not a soldier. A soldier I can feed, and reinforce, and avenge. I cannot feed an envoy two hundred li past my last wall. Send a man into those kingdoms and let some king decide to sell his head to the Xiongnu for one night's good weather, and they will, historian, these desert kings would sell their mothers' skulls for a caravan toll, and there is nothing I can do but scratch your name off the roll. No rescue. No column. You would be dead in every way a commander can arrange, and the title would only be the part of you that had not caught up to it yet."

"Give me the title. I have been the part of a man that has not caught up with itself for forty-one years. I know the feeling."

Dou Gu said nothing. Then he reached for a writing-tablet, and under his ribs Ban Chao felt the thing turn over, because he saw it now. The general had not decided to honour him. He had decided to be rid of him for a cheap price. A soft-handed academic with a wish to die was a nuisance in a war camp, and here was the one errand a nuisance did not come back from, and it cost the general nothing to spend him on it.

"Acting Major." Dou Gu wrote as he said it. "A borrowed rank. It will frighten a barbarian king who cannot read the script, and that is the whole of what it is good for. You will go west, to the nearest of them, Shanshan, and carry the Emperor's greeting to King Guang, and weigh his loyalty. Ink and courtesy. An errand." He looked up, and there was a kind of gentleness in the cruelty, the way a man is gentle with a beast he is about to put down. "You want the desert. I am giving you the shallow end."

"How many men."

"As many as I can spare. Which is to say the ones I will not miss." He set the brush down and called past the flap. "Bring the surplus muster. Sick-list, discipline-list, the ones waiting on the wagons home."

They brought it. And in the beeswax light of that felt house the two of them went down the roll of the army's leavings, and Ban Chao picked out a kingdom's worth of men.

Thirty-six.

He did not choose the number. It was only where the general's patience quit and the good soldiers began. Thirty-six is the count of what an empire will throw away without weeping. There was a cavalryman off the northern campaign, Tian Yi, twenty sound years of war in him and a mouth so foul it had cost him three promotions. Two brothers out of Wugu waiting on a flogging for brawling. Old men whose captains wanted the wagon-space. Hard young ones whose captains wanted them gone. A hollow spearman who had walked out of a burning frontier hamlet and had not, in some way, finished walking.

And one who was not leavings at all. A lean, careful, tidy man named Guo Xun, an attendant off the Commandant's own staff, put on the roll, and Ban Chao knew it in the moment and Guo Xun took no trouble to hide it, not to serve the mission but to watch it, and to carry back to Dou Gu the account of how, and how fast, the clerk got them all killed.

"There is your kingdom, Major." Dou Gu rolled the long rind into a green coil and dropped it in the dish. "Thirty-six the Han will not mourn, and one who will mourn the Han. Take them into the sand. Seal's cut by morning. Keep it dry."

Ban Chao bowed. The exact right depth, the archivist's reflex, the last good manners of the man he had been, and he was a little sick at how clean the bow still came. Then he went out into the white blaze of the Jiuquan afternoon.

The heat put a hand on him. Beyond the mud walls the corridor ran on west, and where it ran the green gave out and the world went to two colours only, the bone of the gravel and the hard blue enamel of the sky, and they met at a line that shook and came apart and would not hold still.

He had the roll in his hand. He read the thirty-six names down, and then again. He did not know one of them. The new sandals were already wrong in the left heel, and he stood in the road working the strap with his thumb and did not fix it, and out past the shimmer the sand kept on going, west, to Shanshan and the Jade Gate and everything the Han had ever been afraid to want.