Chapter 5
After we retreated to Qingzhou, Xie Linchuan held on for four months.
Xie Mingzhao all but lived in his room.
Changing dressings.
Cleaning the wound.
Brewing medicine.
At first, he could still curse at people.
Then his voice grew fainter and fainter, until even sitting up was difficult.
The weather was lovely the day before he died.
When I went to see him, he was leaning by the window in the sun.
Xie Mingzhao was there too.
He had wasted away almost beyond recognition.
“How many men died at Jialing?”
Neither Xie Mingzhao nor I answered.
He answered himself. “Three thousand seven hundred and twenty-one.”
Then he looked out of the window again.
“Mingzhao, you can keep the old officers in line.”
“You’re the Marquis of Zhenbei’s daughter and my father’s adopted daughter. The veterans who served our fathers acknowledge you.”
“Ah Man, you handle the grain now. After all these years, everyone in the army knows you.”
He stopped suddenly.
It was a long time before he spoke again.
“Don’t let the Xie army fall apart.”
“And after that?” I asked.
Xie Linchuan looked at me.
“After that?”
He smiled a little.
“You’ll have to rely on yourselves!”
That night, Xie Linchuan died.
He was twenty-two.
People knelt all around the mourning hall.
The kneeling mourners stretched from the general’s residence along the main street.
Some wept for him.
Some wept for General Xie.
Others wept because they did not know how much longer they themselves would live.
Standing before the bier, I saw a very old sheepskin felt laid beneath his coffin.
A soldier had given it to him during the retreat from Jialing.
Xie Mingzhao had kept it.
She had said:
“Let him lie on it.”
Those words came back to me again.
Passing from camp to camp.
The bedding of ten thousand.
The madman had not been wrong after all.
We had.
…
The moment Xie Linchuan died, Qingzhou fell into turmoil.
Several veteran generals wanted to establish forces of their own. Others proposed serving a different lord.
Some said that with both father and son dead, the army was bound to dissolve.
In the end, Xie Mingzhao entered the command tent in mourning robes.
She laid the old saber the Marquis of Zhenbei had left her on the table. Half the generals in the tent knew that blade.
Her birth father, the Marquis of Zhenbei, had defended the northern frontier for twelve years.
Later, corrupt ministers of the old dynasty had framed him, and almost his entire family had been killed.
General Xie had risked his life to save her and adopted her as his daughter.
By birth, she was the heir of a loyal and honorable family.
By standing, she was General Xie’s daughter.
As for her reputation in the army, who knew how many wounded men owed their lives to her own hands?
Standing there, she asked only one question:
“My adoptive father and my brother are barely cold in their graves. Are you already so eager to divide up the family?”
No one in the tent dared answer.
So Xie Mingzhao became acting commander.
And I took charge of the grain.
Only then did we barely manage to hold the remaining thirteen thousand or so men together.
But the real trouble soon arrived.
Zhao Yuanheng.
He had been General Xie’s ally. He now commanded more than a hundred thousand troops.
As soon as father and son were dead, he sent an envoy.
He offered Qingzhou his protection.
On condition that Xie Mingzhao marry him.
And surrender military command.
As for me—
The envoy glanced at me.
“I hear that Staff Officer Man once received a prophecy about being the bedding of ten thousand. Lord Zhao has many generals under his command. If you are willing, Staff Officer Man, you needn’t worry about finding a place.”
The tent went abruptly silent.
Xie Mingzhao’s hand was already on her saber.
But I said, “Very well.”
The envoy smiled.
I smiled back at him.
“Please inform Lord Zhao that we accept.”
After he left, Xie Mingzhao shut the door.
“You’d better give me a reason.”
I spread out a map.
“Zhao Yuanheng won’t really take us into his army.”
“Then why has he come?”
“For the soldiers.”
I pointed at Heming Valley, west of Qingzhou.
“If the Xie veterans truly surrender, he’s bound to send men to take over the camps.”
Xie Mingzhao understood.
“You want to ambush them?”
I shook my head.
“We have only ten thousand-odd men. We can’t beat them head-on.”
I pointed next at Zhao’s supply route.
“We burn their grain.”
Seven days later, Zhao Yuanheng sent thirty thousand troops, just as expected.
They thought they had come to take charge of a beaten army with no master.
Xie Mingzhao led our main force out, pretending to welcome them and surrender.
I took two hundred picked cavalrymen around their rear along an abandoned salt road.
One fire destroyed half a month’s grain for Zhao’s army.
That night, Xie Mingzhao counterattacked.
Zhao’s thirty thousand troops fell into chaos.
In the end, they were either killed or surrendered.
For the first time, we had won a battle without General Xie or Xie Linchuan.
When rewards were assigned afterward,
I was promoted to staff officer in charge of military stores.
I would oversee grain, arms, and transport for the whole army.
From that day, too, people in the army began addressing me as:
“Staff Officer Man.”
Not because I was Xie Mingzhao’s maid.
Not because I was someone General Xie had picked up.
Only because I had been the one to set that fire.