CHAPTER 3

 

CHAPTER 3 THE GATHERING OF THE THIRTY-SIX

Thirty-Six Blades Forged in Broken Steel;

One Night of Wine Before the Infinite Waste.

Jiuquan, a caravan cellar below the west wall.

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

The seal came down from the tent at dawn, bronze, still warm off the founder's sand. Acting Major, Envoy to the Western Regions. By noon the garrison knew the historian's brother had been handed thirty-six of the army's worst and a road that stopped in the sand. By dark not one of the thirty-six had come to find him.

So he went to them.

They had done the thing thrown-away men do and gathered at the cheapest hole the town kept, a caravan cellar dug half under the west wall, where the Sogdians watered their camels and the wine was frost-grape cut with barley spirit until it would take the lacquer off a shield. No name over the door. A felt roof gone black with forty years of soot. A floor of packed dung and old straw. And a smell he would carry the rest of his life, mutton fat and soured mare's milk and wet wool, and under all of it the iron of men who had killed and not yet settled how they felt about it.

He stood in the doorway and let them look.

He had thought about the clothes on the walk down. Not the scholar's robe. That man had died somewhere past the river with the mule. Not armour he had not earned and could not have named the parts of. He came in a plain hemp tunic and a borrowed sword he did not know the weight of, with the road still grey on his boots, so there would be no lie to catch him in later.

The talk did not stop. That was the first thing. Thirty-odd hard faces turned, saw a soft-handed clerk in the door, and went back to their cups, and the dice and the grumbling carried on as if a boy had come in to sweep.

"That's him," a man said, not troubling to drop his voice. "Brush-breaker. Our general."

The laugh that went round was worse than a fist, because it was cheap. It cost them nothing to give.

At the long middle table sat the one he had come to take first, because going down the muster he had worked out that this was the man the rest watched. Tian Yi. Twenty years of the northern wars sat in his face and three lost promotions sat in his mouth. Broad, a scar hooked down one cheek, and he was cleaning under his nails with the tip of a knife that had plainly done closer work than that. He did not laugh with the others. He looked at Ban Chao the way a butcher looks at a lamb that has started talking.

"Sit before you fall, scribe," Tian Yi said. "You've the look of a man never stood on a floor he didn't watch get swept."

Ban Chao crossed the room and sat. Not at the head, where a commander sits. On the bench straight across from Tian Yi, close in, inside the reach of the knife. He saw the small surprise go through the man. He put a string of the general's cash down on the boards between them.

"Wine," he said to the room. "All of it. On the Emperor's account, seeing the Emperor's already priced us under the wine." He looked round at the turning heads. "Drink the jars dry. I'll give no order tonight. Tonight I only want your names, because a man should know the names of the men he's going to die with."

That stilled them. Not the wine. Soldiers will take wine off a fool as gladly as off a friend. It was the last of it. Die with. Not die for. Not lead. He had said the buried word out loud, the one the general's pity had wrapped in silk, and he had put himself on the near side of it, in the same hole as them.

Tian Yi's knife stopped.

"You know, then," he said.

"I know what we are. He said it to my face and I'll not insult you by dressing it." Ban Chao poured, Tian Yi first, then the two brothers out of Wugu with the flogging-welts still shining under their collars, then a gaunt spearman who was looking at nothing. "No army behind us. No rescue. West of the Jade Gate we're thirty-seven men in a sea of kings who have hated us a hundred years and fear the Xiongnu worse. And I am a copyist of one and forty who has killed nothing bigger than a lamp-moth. That is your general. Now. Whose name do I learn first?"

Nobody spoke. Then the gaunt one, without lifting his head, said, "Why would a man who could sit safe in a library pick this."

His name was Xu Gan. He had walked out of a burning village on the northern line and left a piece of himself in it, and it showed, and it would go on showing.

Ban Chao had a dozen fine answers ready off the road. He used none of them. These were men lied to by better men than him their whole lives, and the lie was the one thing they would smell before it cleared his teeth.

"Because I was dying," he said. "Not of anything a doctor names. Forty-one and my whole world three feet across, and it got narrower every year, and one morning I saw I would die in it having done nothing and been nothing, and my own brother would not think to put my name in the book. I would sooner die in the open at an impossible thing than live folded up small." He looked round the smoke. "Some of you know that death. The one that takes a man while he's still breathing. You were thrown out too. That was the whole of what I asked for on the list."

Tian Yi set the knife down on the boards.

A small thing. Every man there clocked it, because every man there had watched him hold it through the sneering, and now the sneer had put it away.

"Scribe wants names." Tian Yi's voice had turned. Still rough, still sour, but it had faced outward, gone to the voice of a man standing surety. "Fine. Tian Yi. Killed my first at seventeen, lost count after, never once made rank, because I tell generals the truth and generals can't stomach it." He filled his own cup and lifted it a thumb's width. "You told me the truth. First to do it. I still say you'll get us killed. But I'd sooner be got killed by an honest fool than saved by a lying one. Drink."

They drank.

Then, the way river-ice goes in the spring, one crack and then the whole sheet, the names came. The Wugu brothers, both surnamed Li, who beat each other bloodier than any enemy and would let no third man lay a hand on either. Xu Gan, who did not smile, but who moved his cup a thumb nearer. A horse-doctor broken to the ranks for selling the cavalry's physic. A boy of maybe nineteen who had lied about his years to enlist and now wore the face of someone who has thrown everything on one cast of the dice and cannot see it come down. He gave his name twice, too eager, and went red. Ban Chao took each name and said it back and kept it, because whatever else he had thrown out the archive door, he was still a man who never once misremembered what was set in front of him.

Two men did not warm.

One was the one-eyed archer, who drank the wine because it was there and gave nothing for it, and watched Ban Chao across the rim of the cup with his good eye the whole night and did not offer his name until Tian Yi barked it out of him, and then said it like a man spitting a pip. Ban Chao let him be. Not every stone takes mortar the first day.

The other sat apart at a clean end of the bench, back to the wall, cup untouched, and watched the whole thing with the still attention of an auditor going down a column that will not add. Guo Xun. The attendant. The general's eye, and making no secret of it.

When the noise was up and the jars were going, Guo Xun rose, came over, and stood at Ban Chao's shoulder, and spoke low enough to keep it between them. "Well done. The truth used as a tool. Most of them will follow you into the sand now, until the water gets low." He tipped his head a precise degree. "I want you to know I saw it. And that I write everything down. When you get them killed, and the arithmetic says you will, there will be a clean record of how, so the next fool the general sends can at least die of a new mistake and not this one."

Ban Chao looked up at him. He saw the fear under the neatness, saw that the caution was not cowardice but a horror of the unaccounted, of the figure that does not come out even. He did not argue. He did the worse thing. He agreed.

"Good. I want it written. Every step, every turn, every error." Something came up behind his tired eyes that put Guo Xun very still. "My family writes the deaths of kings. I'll hand you the living history of thirty-seven men who did the thing that could not be done, and you'll set it down whether we win or lose, because you can't help it, you're built the way I was built. So write it. All of it. The part where you were wrong included."

Guo Xun said nothing to that. He went back to his corner. But he took, at last, one small measuring sip, and Ban Chao counted it and kept it off his face.

The lamps burned down. The jars went dry near the middle watch and nobody sent out, there being nowhere to send and nothing to send for; they had drunk the place to its lees, thirty-seven strangers turned by the oldest cheap sacrament there is into something that was not loyalty yet and was no longer nothing. A man was already asleep in the straw with his boots on and one hand still round his cup. Somebody had been sick in the far corner and nobody had remarked on it.

He stood when the edge of the roof-flap had started to grey.

"Third watch tomorrow, we go for the Jade Gate," he said. "Sleep off the wine. Bring your grudges and every knife you own." He looked at the room full of the army's leavings, his kingdom, the general had called it, mocking, and the word had come out true. "They threw us out as rubbish. So we've nothing left to lose and one thing left to win, which is the only thing worth the having. Not a wage. A name that outlives us. Go west with me and be men the histories cannot leave out."

The one-eyed archer snorted into his empty cup. Nobody else did.

Outside the wind was up along the base of the wall, working grit under the door. There was one man whose name he had not caught and was too proud to ask a second time, a squat one with a boil coming up on his neck, and until he could learn it properly he filed the man privately as the boil, and was a little ashamed, and kept it. He would have it by the Jade Gate. He had four days to get it, and the whole rest of the desert after.