Chapter 4
By sixteen, I had become an officer in the grain department.
I had twelve bookkeepers and more than thirty grain clerks under me.
The army grain for seven cities passed through my hands.
When the old serving women from the residence saw me now, they no longer dared call me a little beggar.
They bowed their heads and addressed me as “Your Honor.”
The first time I heard it, I was secretly delighted for a long time.
At last I had a title that owed nothing to who had picked me up, or to my being a girl.
I had earned it myself.
That winter, General Xie died in battle at Luochuan.
Of thirty thousand soldiers, fewer than eight thousand returned.
I was checking the winter grain when the news came.
The medicine bowl in Xie Mingzhao’s hand shattered on the ground.
Xie Linchuan did not cry.
He sat before his father’s bier all night.
The next day, he took the command seal.
Everyone was watching him.
People brought up the mad Taoist’s prophecy again.
A dragon rises from humble beginnings.
And ascends at last to the throne.
General Xie might be dead, they said, but the Xie family still had its young master.
Its true dragon.
Xie Linchuan probably thought so himself.
After his father’s sudden death, he was eager to establish his authority.
His first campaign as commander would be an attack on Jialing.
I read the grain registers and went to his command tent that night.
“We can’t attack.”
A dozen generals in the tent turned to look at me.
Xie Linchuan sat in the place of honor.
“Why?”
I pushed the grain registers toward him.
“Jialing has high walls and twenty thousand defenders. Even if we surround it without attacking, we’ll need at least a month. The grain we have will last only twenty-three days.”
One general laughed. “Once we take Jialing, we’ll have grain.”
“And if we haven’t taken it in twenty-three days?” I asked.
His face darkened.
“My father took Lin’an in three days,” Xie Linchuan said. “Is Jialing even a match for Lin’an?”
“Lin’an fell in three days because its commander surrendered.”
I looked at him.
“The Jialing commander’s wife and children are in the capital. He won’t surrender.”
Xie Linchuan’s expression grew uglier by the moment.
In the end, he said only one thing.
“You handle grain. I handle battles.”
We attacked Jialing all the same.
On the twentieth day, the city still stood.
On the twenty-third, rations were cut.
On the twenty-sixth, we slaughtered horses.
On the twenty-ninth, men began deserting.
On the thirty-first, imperial reinforcements struck us from behind.
The Xie army suffered a crushing defeat.
It was worse than Luochuan.
Worse still, while personally covering the retreat, Xie Linchuan took an iron arrow through his right chest.
When they pulled it out, pieces of flesh came with it.
He lost consciousness on the spot.
Xie Mingzhao’s hands trembled as she staunched the bleeding.
But our army still had to retreat.
The Jialing garrison was pursuing us.
We could not abandon the wounded.
And we certainly could not abandon Xie Linchuan.
So we laid him on a grain cart.
The jolting road tore his chest wound open again and again.
The first night, we reached the northern camp. Its soldiers took the bedding off their own beds to cushion the cart boards.
The second night, at Huaiyuan Camp, others brought sheepskin felt.
The third night.
The fourth.
We kept losing ground, kept retreating.
And Xie Linchuan moved from camp to camp with the remnants of the army.
Some soldiers slept on the snow themselves, handing their bedding to his guards instead.
They said:
“Put it under the young master.”
“Don’t let the jolting tear his wound open again.”
Before long, the hard grain cart was covered in thick layers of bedding, felt, and old padded coats.
When Xie Linchuan woke now and then and saw them, he would ask who had sent them.
No one could say for certain.
There were too many.
Sitting beside the cart shafts, I suddenly remembered those words from eight years ago.
Passing from camp to camp.
The bedding of ten thousand.
My heart gave a violent jolt.
But no one had time to think about prophecies then.
Xie Linchuan was dying.