As the sitting Right Chancellor, Qin Siyuan handled nothing but pressing state affairs, consumed daily by an endless stream of business. Ning Yi and the others had already noticed, on their earlier visit, that theirs hadn’t been the only appointment that afternoon—a good number of others, quite possibly officials of rank, were also waiting in the side hall. By now, Ning Yi had effectively become one of Qin Siyuan’s own trusted circle, practically an advisor in all but name. So, once the matter of Wang Shanyue was settled, Qin Siyuan left Ning Yi in the care of Yao Zunian, Cheng Zhouhai, and the others, while he himself went to attend to the officials waiting outside.
As for the manpower the Secret Investigation Bureau had devoted to the Liangshan matter, and the intelligence it held, the true details actually lay with these advisors around him—Qin Siyuan himself controlled only the broad strategic picture. Once he had left, Cheng Zhouhai and the others retrieved the relevant files from the study, and together with Ning Yi and Yao Zunian and Wenren Buer, the four of them settled beneath the grape trellis outside the study to begin the real briefing for Ning Yi.
As for Qin Shaoyu, he had no real place in such a formal setting—Qin Siyuan certainly wasn’t ready to entrust matters of the Secret Investigation Bureau to this rather unaccomplished nephew of his, so he hadn’t been called to join them for now.
“In the years before Chancellor Qin returned to office, the Bureau’s activities were confined mostly to the north, so honestly, our grasp on men like Song Jiang wasn’t especially strong. Even now, though we’re focusing our efforts on Song Jiang, Tian Hu, and Wang Qing, when it comes to actually mobilizing force, we still have to go through the army—and frankly, relying on them to fight is asking for trouble. It’s not that they’re entirely useless in battle, but there’s a great deal of bureaucratic wrangling involved. Brother Ning, you should prepare yourself for that going in…”
Of the three, Yao Zunian held the most senior standing, and Wenren Buer had previously been responsible for matters in the south, so it fell to the rather cool and detached Cheng Zhouhai to lay out the details. What they could offer Ning Yi for now was a rough picture of the intelligence around the Liangshan Marsh—the locations and numbers of troops stationed there, records of previous government campaigns against it, along with several accompanying maps.
“Honestly, the most detailed intelligence will probably only come once Brother Ning reaches Shandong and gets it directly from Junior Brother Wang Shanyue. What we have now can only give you a rough sense of things for the time being… Chancellor Qin must have already told you about Junior Brother Wang’s situation?”
“Mm, he mentioned something about… an unusual temperament?”
“Heh, you’ll understand once you’ve met him, Brother Ning. He’s a bit extreme in temperament… understandable, given what his family has been through, but he’s not difficult to get along with, honestly.”
At the mention of Wang Shanyue, the expressions of the men around him all turned somewhat complicated—not mocking smiles, exactly. This, for the moment, put a dent in Ning Yi’s earlier theory that the man was gay. They kept saying he was extreme in temperament yet not difficult to get along with—could it be someone who looked like a delicate pretty boy but had a temperament as blunt and coarse as Zhang Fei, cursing enemies out all day long? The thought struck him as rather strange.
As they talked, servants from the household brought out chilled mung bean soup; a breeze drifted through the courtyard, and beneath the grape trellis it was pleasantly cool. Yao Zunian and Cheng Zhouhai traded anecdotes and gossip from various regions, mostly revolving around the larger bandit groups currently active. Both men were deeply learned, and with Wenren Buer joining in, the conversation ranged widely and stayed lively throughout. Ning Yi sipped his mung bean soup, occasionally chiming in—when it came to understanding the broader currents of the realm, he certainly couldn’t match these two, though his time with Fang La’s forces had given him some grounding, and with his sharp eye, what he did contribute wasn’t off the mark. Cheng Zhouhai and Yao Zunian already knew what he’d accomplished, and simply took his reticence as reluctance to speak too freely with new acquaintances—nothing surprising there.
As the conversation about Liangshan moved on to Wang Qing and Tian Hu, something occurred to Ning Yi, and he asked about the situation around Mount Lüliang. Yao Zunian shook his head.
“Not many people there, but it’s a hard place to live. I traveled through there myself, years ago. Near Yanmen Pass, where there are garrisoned troops, things are somewhat better, but venture off to either side and it becomes a lawless no-man’s-land. The mountains are treacherous, the land poor, the roads difficult—the bandits of Mount Lüliang are fierce, because in a place like that, if you’re not fierce, you don’t survive. The Liao raiders sometimes push into the mountains looking to plunder—not purely for grain, either. The Liao have a savage, brutal streak; finding a village or stockade in the mountains and wiping it out is considered an act of valor among them. In wartime, sometimes they’ll set fires that spread across whole mountainsides, and neither people nor animals can escape… And on our side, sometimes, we go raiding into their territory too…”
“Our side?” Ning Yi echoed.
Yao Zunian frowned, clearly not entirely approving himself. “Mm, it’s not only the Liao who go raiding for plunder—they come to us, we go to them. Ever since the sixteen prefectures of You-Yan were lost, this has simply become the way of things. We don’t fight full-scale battles against each other, but raiding border populations has become routine on both sides. I found it hard to stomach back in my day, but there was nothing to be done—the army treats it as a way to train and sustain troops… though what kind of soldiers it actually produces, I couldn’t say. Still, killing men and taking heads counts as military merit; after killing, whatever goods and grain there are can be seized as well, and as for the women… well, that goes without saying. Of course, most of this sort of thing is directed at the Liao and the herding peoples—it’s considered good for morale. But the people of Mount Lüliang, essentially, fall into that same category as well…”
“Ah, I see.” Ning Yi nodded, able to imagine the rest well enough.
“Mm. That region has never truly been under anyone’s control. There are people there, but not enough resources to go around—life is precarious, so all that’s left is to take up a blade and rob. Merchants traveling between the two sides through Yanmen Pass are subject to heavy taxation by the border garrison; those with connections or who know the routes well instead take the Lüliang route—get through safely once, and the profit is enormous. The border army has tried to clear out Lüliang several times, without lasting success. Merchants who take the mountain route are, in effect, cutting into the border army’s own profits, and the people of Lüliang show no deference to anyone—whoever they encounter, they rob and kill without exception. If merchant families cry out afterward, the standard excuse is simply that the army failed to suppress the bandits adequately. In the end, nobody has any love for them. I’ve heard that some of the larger merchant houses quietly support the border army’s campaigns against Lüliang—but once a campaign ends, the army can hardly maintain a permanent garrison there, so once the bandit numbers in the mountains thin out, it only becomes easier for merchants to pass through the Lüliang route again…”
“Heh heh.” Ning Yi laughed, and the others under the grape trellis shook their heads with wry smiles too, unsure whether to think Ning Yi simply callous or a man cut out for great affairs. But in truth, everyone present had, at some point, done great and difficult things themselves—however much they might personally dislike a given matter, none of them were the type to show outrage over it.
“So when the border garrisons run short on herding peoples to use as targets, the army heads into the mountains to make up the numbers with heads of their own. There are a few… big merchant houses that make their fortune specifically off traveling through Mount Lüliang. Plenty of their own people have been killed by the Lüliang bandits over the years, so they’re the ones who quietly stir up this arrangement with the army—hand over a head of a Lüliang bandit, and they’ll pay out a share of silver for it. The army takes the heads, reports to the court that these were Liao raiders crossing the border, and effectively collects payment twice over…”
“Doesn’t the Secret Investigation Bureau have anyone stationed there?”
Yao Zunian shook his head. “Manpower’s already stretched thin as it is—stationing people there wouldn’t accomplish much anyway. The people there are fierce enough locally, but their influence never really spreads south. Though, from what’s come through from our contacts in Liao and Jin territory, most cross-border traffic actually goes through Lüliang rather than Yanmen Pass these days. The latest reports we’ve received mention, if only in passing, a particular stockade that’s been growing its influence quickly within Tonghe Mountain. They don’t kill the merchants—instead, they take a proportional cut of goods in exchange for safe passage—though they haven’t yet managed to fully open up a route connecting north and south.”
Cheng Zhouhai said, “I remember that one too—the reports said that if travel between north and south eventually comes to run through that route, it would make things considerably easier. Though… I doubt it’ll last long. The moment they actually manage to open up that north-south corridor, that’ll be the moment they’re wiped out.”
Yao Zunian nodded. “Too big a prize for anyone to simply let them keep. As long as they stayed scattered through the mountains, without any fixed base, even a punitive campaign would have nowhere solid to strike. But once they grow large enough to establish real roots, there’ll be no dodging it when others come for them. Our side would break them up, and the Liao, for their part, would sweep through and wipe them out entirely as well. Though the Liao are stretched thin themselves at the moment, it seems this Tian Hu has his eye on that stretch of territory too… In the end, the borderlands were never meant for people to truly live in. It’s a rare thing indeed for anyone from that region to come to a peaceful end…”
Sitting at the small wooden table, Ning Yi tilted his head, resting his chin on his hand as he listened, a faint smile on his face. He wasn’t thinking about the crisis the two men were describing so much as about Lu Hongti, and something she’d once told him.
Joyful and carefree along the Fen River banks, muddling along together in southeastern Jin. Weeping and wailing at Mount Lüliang, even death is nothing worse than Yanmen Pass. He’d heard this rhyme even before meeting Lu Hongti herself. In his mind, he’d had some rough sense of just how brutal that place could be—but it was only now, hearing Yao Zunian describe it, that he felt he truly grasped it more clearly. Whenever Lu Hongti used to speak of Mount Lüliang before, saying things like “people there don’t live like people,” he’d always taken it as something of an understatement on her part. Perhaps, to her, having grown used to it, Mount Lüliang hadn’t seemed quite so unbearable after all.
But hearing Yao Zunian lay out the tangle of vested interests behind it all, Ning Yi could now see far more clearly just what that world was truly like.
Back in Hangzhou, before all this, Lu Hongti had traveled a thousand li to find him, and Ning Yi could well guess that she’d likely hoped to bring him back up the mountain to help her. But at the time, Ning Yi had known he couldn’t leave, and in his heart, he hadn’t particularly wanted to go suffer on Mount Lüliang either—so he’d offered a subtle hint to that effect early on, and in the end, she’d never actually brought the matter up directly. Thinking back on it now, he could sense just how badly she must have wanted someone to come up the mountain and help her.
Truly interesting—in the end, she’d never once actually asked.
That woman, having survived in the harshest of environments, was perhaps a little too soft-hearted, too easily taken advantage of, for her own good…
Taking a small notebook and dragging the actual person up the mountain were, after all, two entirely different concepts.
Of course, Ning Yi had no real need to worry over what Yao Zunian and the others had been describing. Self-interest was the root of every evil in the world—no one understood that better than he did. In his parting words of caution to Lu Hongti, he’d specifically told her not to overreach. Lu Hongti’s stronghold, called Green Wood Stockade, once it grew to a certain point, would only expand outward horizontally—bringing the various surrounding bandit strongholds under loose control without formally absorbing them into her own ranks. This way, merchants passing through Mount Lüliang would still face real danger elsewhere, but within the territory Lu Hongti controlled, it would become a relatively safe waystation by comparison. With that contrast established, at least some of the larger merchant houses would come to regard her operation favorably.
At this stage, many merchants might even support Green Wood Stockade’s growth, hoping the stockade could genuinely open up a safe route through Lüliang—though that particular goal would likely remain indefinitely out of reach. Green Wood Stockade, taking in goods and support while developing and strengthening itself as much as possible, might, riding the chaos of the Jin-Liao war and the Wu Dynasty’s own restless maneuvering nearby, manage to carve out a path for itself somewhere in the cracks between the larger powers. That, of course, would still be an arduous process—likely even harder than Ning Yi had once imagined.
Thinking all this over, Ning Yi found himself suddenly wishing that, whenever he had the chance, he ought to go visit Mount Lüliang himself, and see how that formidable, skilled woman warrior was doing now that she’d returned to Lüliang…