Chapter 3
By the time I was twelve, General Xie had taken seven cities.
The old dynasty’s emperor was a fool. Drought gripped the north and floods the south, yet the provincial and county officials kept raising taxes.
More and more people could no longer survive.
So the rebel armies grew.
Some followed General Xie.
Others followed the King of Han in Hedong, Marshal Zhao in Longxi, or Heavenly King Chen in Jiangnan.
The world was like a shattered bowl.
Everyone scrambled for the biggest piece.
Xie Linchuan was fifteen.
The mad Taoist’s prophecy was like a seed, growing larger in everyone’s heart.
After a few drinks, soldiers would clap his shoulder. “If you really do rule the realm one day, young master, don’t forget your old brothers.”
He always told them to stop talking nonsense.
But his eyes shone ever brighter.
He began riding into battle with General Xie, and he did have ability.
The first time he led three hundred men in an ambush, they killed more than seventy enemy soldiers.
The day he returned, the people lined the streets to welcome him.
I stood at the granary door and watched him ride past on a tall horse.
In his silver armor, the young man looked full of spirit.
Some knelt and called him young master.
Others called him young general.
A few bold souls even ventured a whispered “true dragon.”
He heard.
He did not stop them.
I suddenly remembered the boy who had blushed with a book on warfare in his arms, all those years ago.
Hear something often enough, and you really did begin to believe it.
Xie Mingzhao, meanwhile, believed in fate less and less.
At seventeen, she could already draw a bow rated at two shi of draw weight.
General Xie would not let her go to battle, so she went to the camp for the wounded instead.
At first she only kept records of medicinal supplies for the doctors. Then she began cleaning wounds. Later still, whenever disease broke out in a camp, she went there.
Some mocked her: a general’s daughter, spending her days among blood and pus.
She never paid them any mind.
She only asked me whether there were enough herbs left.
I spent less and less time in the residence myself.
General Xie discovered that although I could not remember poems or essays, I almost never got an account wrong.
How much grain three thousand men ate in a day.
How much bean fodder five hundred horses needed.
Which roads grain carts could not take after rain.
Which counties had just suffered locusts, where another grain levy would kill people.
I remembered all of it after a single look.
At fourteen, I went with the army for the first time.
Not to fight.
To escort grain.
General Xie gave me twenty carts, a hundred civilian laborers, and thirty soldiers.
The night before we left, I was too nervous to sleep.
When Xie Linchuan heard, he rode over especially to enjoy the spectacle.
“So Ah Man of the bedding of ten thousand is off to the army camps too?”
He had been teasing me with those words for years.
By then, I knew what they meant.
The first time I understood, I cried with anger all night.
Later, after hearing them so often, I stopped caring so much.
I glared at him.
“Don’t worry, young master. Even if I really do go looking for ten thousand men, you won’t be one of them.”
The soldiers beside us all struggled not to laugh.
His face went livid.
It was the first time I had left him speechless.
I felt wonderful.
By that evening, though, I was no longer laughing.
At Blackstone Slope, our grain convoy ran into a crowd of refugees.
A thousand at least.
Every one of them was skin and bone.
When they saw the grain carts, their eyes looked just like my elder brother’s had when he saw meat, all those years ago.
The soldiers guarding the grain drew their swords.
The officer leading them asked whether we should charge through.
I looked at those people.
There were old people, women, and many children.
One little girl lay against her mother’s back.
She no longer had the strength to cry.
I suddenly remembered being nine.
“No,” I said.
The officer panicked. “If we lose the grain, we’ll all lose our heads!”
“How far is the forward camp?”
“Forty li.”
“How many days’ rations do they have left?”
“At least five.”
I did some calculations.
Then I ordered three carts unloaded.
His face went white.
“Miss Ah Man, that’s army grain!”
“I know.”
I had cooking pots set up.
We could not simply hand out three carts of grain.
A thousand people would fight for it.
People would die.
I told the soldiers to make porridge first.
The first pot was thin.
The second was thinner still.
Each person could have only one bowl.
Only after the hungriest had eaten did I climb onto a grain cart and ask whether they wanted work.
Mending roads.
Pushing carts.
Carrying wounded soldiers.
Two meals a day for anyone willing to work.
Of those thousand-odd refugees, more than eight hundred came with me.
Far from losing the grain, we reached the forward camp half a day ahead of schedule.
Those eight hundred people had worked together to repair the muddy stretch of mountain road.
General Xie said nothing for a long time after hearing what had happened.
I knelt in his tent, expecting a beating with military staves.
In the end, he asked only, “What if the forward camp had had just one day’s grain left?”
I thought.
“Then I wouldn’t have given them a single grain.”
“Don’t you pity them?”
“I do. But if the forward camp ran out of food, thousands of soldiers would break ranks. Thousands of hungry men with swords running loose would kill far more people.”
For the first time, he smiled at me.
Then he said, “From today on, report to the grain office. You needn’t be a maid anymore.”
My head shot up.
The first post he gave me was a lowly one.
Granary clerk.
It did not sound grand, but it paid a salary: one and a half strings of coins a month.
I was so happy I could not sleep all night.
The next day, I made a special trip to see Xie Mingzhao.
I showed her the newly issued wooden token at my waist.
Four characters were neatly carved on it.
Granary clerk.
I could read every one of them now.