The Warring States, Books 1-3 Read online

  Zhai looked into those eyes now as Wu made his comment to Yue, which was thoroughly ignored by the general as if he’d not even heard it, and he saw the manly bravado that Wu had carried with him from the chariots to the embrasures vanish, replaced by the childish look of worry, concern, and even more ominously, fear, that so characterized the heir’s appearance and outlook.

  Wu was fast approaching fifty, more than twice the age his father had been when he’d assumed the leadership of Wei from his own father nearly a half-century before. Zhai knew that Wu bridled at that, wanting to become Marquis himself, but he also knew that the thought equally worried Wu. Whatever mold Wu had been cast from, it certainly wasn’t the same as that which produced Wen. Wu seemingly possessed none of the qualities that his father did: wisdom, decisiveness, and good-judgment, although he neither exhibited any of the qualities that had driven so many states into ruin when a father lived too long for his son’s ambitions. Thankfully there was no fear that Wu would try and kill his father to gain power, mainly because Wu was so fearful of power in the first place.

  Blessed Shangdi! Zhai marveled to himself, thinking of the Supreme God and his myriad peculiarities in his choices for men. Why was it that such a competent and respected ruler as Marquis Wen, a man that had gained so much over the years, elevating his state to one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful, of the Seven States, should have such an inept son, one that would surely squander and lose everything that his father had worked so hard to attain.

  Zhai wasn’t the only one who wished that something would befall Wu before his father died, making Wu’s son, Hui, heir apparent. Now there was a man that was fit to be a marquis, if not a king, Zhai thought, picturing the boy in his mind. Funny, he thought, looking at Wu; he still thought of Hui as a boy. Somewhere out there among these thousands of soldiers was Hui, perhaps even watching the proceedings between his father and grandfather at this very moment. What did Hui think of his father, Zhai wondered? Surely he saw the same inadequacies that everyone else saw and spoke about when they were out of earshot of any of the royal family. Was Hui the type to plot against his own father, perhaps even before he became Marquis? He certainly was more commanding than his father, but still, Hui wasn’t the dominant personality that his grandfather was, able to bend men to his will, and he didn’t have the diplomatic touch to solve problems like his father. Many in the State of Wei knew this and dreaded him coming to the throne, suspecting when he did the state would suffer some dire calamity.

  Still, there was little that could be done for that, besides treachery, which would be worse than either coming to the throne. Zhai loved Marquis Wen, but he knew that the man, despite his total lack of concern over the issue, didn’t have that many years yet to live. His son would come to power, but how long would he reign? Twenty years at the most? Even fewer? And then it would be Hui’s turn to lead the State of Wei, Shangdi help us!

  “How far is the river from here?” Wen asked Yue, completely ignoring the brief exchange between his son and the general.

  “Not far, Sire, less than a mile in fact.”

  Wen nodded. “I should like to have an audience with Ximen Bao before the day is through, that is if you think that he could spare me more time than he has your messengers.”

  Yue was flustered for a moment, unable to detect the slight humor that Wen was known to throw into a conversation from time-to-time, a trait that even managed to turn his enemies into friends.

  “I’ll make sure that he does,” Yue said forcefully, no doubt perturbed by the thought that Ximen Bao would have the gall to dismiss his Marquis, Zhai thought.

  “Very well,” Wen said, folding his arms into his robes and turning from the city to Yue, looking patiently at his general.

  Yue stood confused for a few moments, probably still trying to puzzle out what exactly Wen had implied, before Zhai interrupted his thoughts.

  “General, shall we take a chariot to the river, or would it do the Marquis’s feet good to walk the distance?”

  If Yue was flustered before he was completely off-balance now. “Why, we could do either, but…,” he paused looking from Wen to Zhai and back again, “but I think it would be best to take a chariot, don’t you?”

  “I think it would,” Zhai replied and this time he held out his own arm, showing Wen the way back to the chariots and leaving Yue still standing in the mud trying to figure out what it was that had just occurred.

  “There may be assassins among the men,” Wu said as Wen and Zhai reached him and he fell in beside them for the walk back to the chariots. “It would do best for you to retire to your tent, father, which is being erected as we speak further down the road.”

  Wen turned to look at Zhai, a smile once again on his face. The Marquis certainly was happy on this eve of his reign’s anniversary!

  “My son seems to think that I’ve never walked upon a field of battle before, Zhai,” Wen said. “Perhaps we shouldn’t have taken him with us after all, but left him back in the libraries of Anyi to study the scrolls of my many victories over the past fifty years.”

  Zhai said nothing, only gave a slight smile, his eyes locked down on the muddy road. It was fine for the Marquis to make light of his son’s unwarranted concern; it would not do, however, for his Minister of War to begin chiding the heir as well.

  “We’ve been riding hard for nearly three days, father,” Wu pressed, “certainly you must be tired from such a journey.”

  “I am tired from the journey, Wu, but not as tired as I’m becoming from listening to your constant badgering over my safety,” Wen said bitingly.

  Zhai glanced over and saw Wu flinch back at the rebuttal, narrow his eyes, then appear ready to make a retort. Thankfully he thought the better of it and seemed to relax. They walked the rest of the way back to the chariots in silence save for the still-cheering soldiers on either side of them.

  TWO

  The workers moved, but not fast enough.

  “Get those support beams up and in place! Move!”

  Ximen Bao stood on a high mound of hard-packed red earth and watched the hundred or so workers scurry in the mud and ankle-deep water below.

  “Shangdi help us!” he muttered to himself as he saw a group of ten workers lose their footing in the water, falter, nearly correct themselves, then completely drop their massive wooden beam to the ground, almost taking out the ten workers to their right.

  “If only I was back down on the Zhang River,” Ximen said muttered as he shook his head and turned away from the commotion beneath him. “Now there was a project worthy of my time!”

  Ximen stroked his long and spiked, black beard as he walked along the embankment. He was a tall man, nearly six feet in height, and rail-thin, although if one looked closely they could see that it was a muscled thinness from the hard work which the engineer took part in still, even though he was past fifty. His black hair was cut short in the back but allowed to grow long in the front so he could comb it back. Usually, as today, it was fastened on top with a pin so that it would stay out of his eyes, eyes that were wrinkled and hallowed from so many years spent outdoors with the sun in them. His mustache, a large gap in the middle under his nose, blew in the faint breeze before flowing down past his chin, and he brushed at it absently as he walked.

  He turned and looked north, back along the path of the river, a path which he’d painstakingly created over the past six months, ever since it’d been decided by General Yue Yang that the capital city of Zhongshan wouldn’t give up and could not be breached by men alone. Large earthen embankments spread for more than two miles from north to south before they met the larger Fan River, a river which flowed from east to west, paralleling the path of the mighty Yellow River to the south. In less than a day now, Ximen knew, the Fan River would no longer be flowing west like the Yellow, but south through those earthen embankments that his workers had spent so much time building to his exacting specifications, specifications which were still not completely satisfactory.
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  Turning south, Ximen looked back along the mile-long distance to the city. The whole way was marked out easily by those embankments which paralleled the road and led right up to the city gates.

  “I just hope they hold,” Ximen said to himself, not quite sure what the outcome of tomorrow would be.

  He’d sent the bird off to Anyi to inform Marquis Wen about his progress more than two days ago now, although he hadn’t wanted to. Yue Yang, himself under pressure to bring down the defiant city in time for the anniversary of Marquis Wen’s reign, had insisted that Ximen send the message off.

  “It doesn’t matter that you’re not wholly completed with the embankments, yet,” Yue had said early in the morning three days before. “You’ll have had ample time to complete the necessary arrangements in the time that it takes the Marquis to get to the city.”

  “I haven’t the men or the time to finish properly!” Ximen had argued.

  “You’ll have the men, hundreds if that’s what it takes, and their numbers will give you the time,” Yue had said firmly before laying the paper in front of Ximen, the message on it already written out and but awaiting his seal.

  Ximen had chopped it; what choice did he have? If Yue wanted the diversion completed in two days time, the diversion would be completed in two days time. At least he’d been true to his word; that afternoon another three hundred soldiers had appeared in his camp, doubling his workforce. They were clumsy and more used to following orders blindly than thinking for themselves, something which made that first day almost counterproductive. The next day they’d somehow pulled together, however, and the work had gone quickly and without incident. Now they only had to lay support beams in the more troublesome areas of the embankments and they would be finished.

  “I just hope they hold,” Ximen said again to himself as he looked at the embankments stretching for more than a mile to the city gates, not wanting to think about what would happen if they didn’t.

  His attention was jerked away from the city and toward a faint cloud of dust that was growing along the road. He narrowed his eyes and put his hand to his forehead to block the sun.

  “Chariots, two of them, coming up fast,” he said to himself before lowering his arm and turning back the way he’d come. “What does Yue want now?”

  He wouldn’t scurry down to the road to find out, that was for sure. Yue knew well enough by now that he wasn’t going to scamper to his every beck-and-call. Ximen walked back to the edge of the embankment and looked down at the workers who were just managing to get one end of the large support beam wedged down into the mud before they braced it against the embankment. Ximen sighed as he watched them and then jumped off the embankment and began hopping and sliding down the earthen slope to the mud and water below. Yue was always quick with his inspections if he saw that Ximen was working alongside his men, and Ximen was in no mood for an inspection this morning.

  * * * * *

  “The height is much greater than I imagined,” Marquis Wen said loudly to Yue, who was standing beside him in the chariot and steering the horses down the road and past the embankments to their left.

  “What?” Yue yelled beside him, unable to hear over the rush of wind and the horse’s hooves pounding down the road.

  “The embankments,” Wen yelled this time, “they’re higher than I imagined.”

  Yue nodded but kept his eyes fixed on the road ahead of them. “Aye, they have to be, according to Ximen. The Fan is a swift river, and once unleashed from its usual course it’ll come flooding down into this valley with a vengeance.”

  Wen nodded but said nothing more. He would wait to get the exact details from Ximen Bao himself. It had been more than six months since Wen had sent a messenger to the Zhang River requesting Ximen’s presence in the capital. He’d known that a bird wouldn’t do for a summons; Ximen would have simply ignored it, waited for another to arrive, and then ignored that one as well. Only an emissary from the royal court would’ve been able to pull the dogged engineer from his beloved canal project, a project which he’d envisioned and which would not see completion during his lifetime, perhaps not even the lifetimes of his children, or even grandchildren.

  Ximen had made rather swift progress to the capital, taking only four days, even though Wen knew the journey could have been made in half the time. He put up with the delay, as well as the engineer’s rather ungracious moods and manners, for Ximen was the best engineer in the whole of the Seven States, a fact which the man knew and which afforded him a certain amount of leeway.

  That leeway was not enough, however, to ensure that Ximen could stay on at his beloved canal project. Wen smiled as he remembered how Ximen had begun to argue when it was made known that he’d instead be sent north, across Zhao lands, to the small State of Zhongshan.

  “Whatever for?” Ximen had said scornfully. “That state knows nothing about hydraulics and there are more important matters right here in Wei.”

  “You will complete a project much like the project your father completed for my father more than fifty years ago,” Wen had answered calmly in the face of Ximen’s tirade.

  Ximen had swallowed whatever rebuke he’d been ready to throw at his Marquis and instead narrowed his eyes and stroked his beard.

  “You want me to do to Zhongshan what was done to Jinyang,” Ximen had said more than asked.

  Wen had remained silent as he watched Ximen put the pieces together in his mind; weighing the possibilities and calculating the problems.

  “There is no other way?” he’d asked after several moments, turning his eyes back to Wen. “Fighting alone won’t subdue the city?”

  Wen had shaken his head. “They’ll not give in and we cannot breach their defenses with men alone. Only you, Ximen Bao, can subdue the once mighty State of Zhongshan and bring it into the State of Wei.”

  “It will be a difficult project, one that will take a great deal of time and manpower,” Ximen had said, his interest and curiosity piqued by Wen’s skillful stroking of his ego.

  “You’ll have all the men you need and three months in which to do it,” Wen had answered quickly.

  Ximen had shaken his head. “I will need at least six, possibly more. I haven’t even seen the land yet.”

  “Very well,” Wen had agreed. “You will have six months and whatever else you require, but you must leave at once, this very night.”

  “And the Zhang River Canal, what of that?” Ximen had asked, his eyes narrowing once again. “If work is halted there to subdue Zhongshan it’ll set us back years.”

  “The work will not stop,” Wen had said quickly. “Your subordinates will carry on the work. I know from your reports that there is more than enough general labor to keep all your men there busy for nearly a year before major engineering changes are again called for.”

  “It’s not that simple!” Ximen had begun before Wen had cut him off with an upraised hand.

  “The decision has been made, and you will leave at once.”

  Even Ximen had known the limits of his already questionable stretching of royal patience, so he’d simply bowed, ensured that the project would be completed, and left the palace and then Anyi. That was the last time Wen had seen his chief engineer.

  “Whoa!” Yue yelled as he pulled on the reins and brought the twin black horses to a halt where the road ended in front of a large earthen embankment that jutted off from that which they’d been running parallel to since leaving the city defenses a few minutes before.

  Yue handed the reins to a worker who quickly ran down from the embankments and then hopped off the chariot.

  “The Fan River runs east-west right behind that large embankment in front of us,” Yue pointed out with his arm to Wen. “Ximen should be atop it or down on the other side.”

  Wen nodded and hiked up his robes. “Then let us make our way to the top. I’m eager to hear how the project has progressed from the engineer himself.”

  Yue began to protest, but Wen was already climbing up the earthen
slope, his white and grey robes held tightly in his hands, although the hems had already become stained with the red mud that was everywhere. Yue sighed and pulled up his own robes and fell in behind his marquis. There was no sense in trying to talk him out climbing up the fifty-foot slope, Yue knew; once Wen had his mind set on something nothing and no one could change it.

  “Father, please, let me go and fetch Ximen myself,” Wu’s voice called up after them.

  Yue looked behind him to see the second chariot pull up behind the first, Zhai tugging on the reins and Wu waiting impatiently for it to stop so he could jump out. Yue stopped, and turned back toward Wen, but the marquis was already several feet further up the slope than he had been when Yue had turned away. Obviously the man wasn’t in the mood to listen to anyone today but Ximen, so Yue began trudging up the slope once again, Wu’s futile protestations following from below.

  The embankment rose up more than fifty feet and it took the two men a few minutes to ascend its steep slope. When they reached the top, reddened dirt and stones still tumbling down below them, they could see all the way back to the city more than a mile away. The whole length from the city to where they now stood was piled high with the same embankments, two long, snake-like rises thirty feet apart, a deep trench between them. That trench was empty for the time being, but in less than a day it would be full of water.

  Wen stood for a moment scanning the view. To the north of them was the Fan River, nearly fifty feet below them and only a few dozen feet away. Wen could see the large waves churned up by the spring runoff from the Luliang Mountains and could imagine the sound the smaller boulders were making as they were churned along in its wake. He walked across the embankment to the other side and peered down into the deep trench. There were several dozen workers below hoisting large wooden beams and wedging them into the slopes of the embankment that he stood on as well as that across from him. He scanned the trench and saw that their were similar beams running for hundreds of feet along the embankments toward the city, their numbers increasing the closer they got to the river. Already there was a pooling of water, seepage from the river he imagined, that was collecting in the trench. The workers were nearly up to their knees in it the closer they were to the river and in the space of just a few moments Wen could see several large chunks of earth fall from the embankments to roll down into the watery trench. It was no wonder they needed the support beams; this close to the river the embankments wouldn’t last much longer.