Chapter 65

After they set out, as they went among the Jing hills and their winding valleys south of Anhua Commandery, Pan Guangling kept remembering, and would go on remembering for years to come, the thing Zhuo Siheng had said to He Mengchun the night before they left.

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"Whenever a new vice-prefect takes up his post, he has to make a round of the counties in the commandery. Much as I'd like to keep company with you over poetry, my lord, I'm bound by the court's dull business. I hope you'll bear with me."

The look of pained regret on Zhuo Siheng's face as he said this all but brought Lord He, who'd already spent half a night as his bosom friend, to tears. He sighed. "Yunshan, you're a young talent. For all that ours is a friendship between gentlemen, where rank shouldn't be weighed, this official's robe does hold a man back all his life... Don't be downcast. Everything you see and feel on the road, set it down in verse, and send it to me, or save it till you're back and we'll talk. You're new to the commandery, so I've sent a commandery order down to the officials of the four counties, telling them to heed your every word. You needn't fear anyone making trouble for you, and if any dares, just come back and tell me! See if I don't deal with the wretches!"

It was the first time Pan Guangling had seen Lord He thump his chest and talk so loud.

And Lord He hardly ever troubled himself with local matters. He only passed reports up and orders down as they came, and rarely so much as asked a question or stepped in. Yet here he was, sending a commandery order down to the counties. Did that not mean no one on this whole journey would dare give him or Lord Zhuo any trouble at all?

"Then I thank you for your care, my lord."

"Yunshan, this is a private farewell dinner I've laid on for you. There's no need for such forms."

"Then I'll not stand on ceremony, Brother Bolan."

Zhuo Siheng slid from one form of address to the other, smooth as could be, his face and manner as easy as ever, as though he and Lord He were brothers of long and deep friendship and the name came to him of its own accord.

"Good! Here, let your elder brother drink to you!"

Madam He came out to greet the guest during the meal too. Her talk was bright and frank, far easier than her stiff, tongue-tied husband's. Seeing how Lord He valued Zhuo Siheng, she wanted her own household's best guards to see him along the road. Zhuo Siheng thanked her but said that under Lord He's rule the local people were so honest and content that he'd come into the commandery by the hardest mountain road and never met a bandit, so there was all the less need now for such a show and such a drain on men. Lord He and his wife were greatly pleased to hear it, and praised Zhuo Siheng for being thrifty and even-tempered, with the plain, old-fashioned manner of a good official.

After a few rounds, Lord He had drunk little but was already floating. Zhuo Siheng drained a toast and said with a smile, "In truth, I've one more thing to ask of you for this journey."

"Say it, by all means!"

Zhuo Siheng raised and held out his cup. "I know you love to roam hills and waters, Brother Bolan, and that there's fine brushwork of yours all over the commandery, always at the loveliest spots where hill and water meet. On this trip I'd like to follow in your footsteps along the way, and press on beyond the commandery too, step for step, to look on the fair sights and savor your writing. But I don't know which places are worth a visit, or where your inscriptions are. I hope you'll do me the kindness of drawing me a rough map, so I can seek them out and look on them with proper respect."

Hearing this was the reason, Lord He said "good, good, good" on the spot, and had men open the commandery storehouse and bring out the map of Jinzhou. In plain line and red wash, he drew the whole of Anhua Commandery and the two commanderies around it, dotted a dozen points of ink on it, and told Zhuo Siheng in full detail where the lovely scenes and his own inscriptions lay along the way, marking each one, for fear he'd forget.

Pan Guangling was shaken. A prefecture map, he knew, touched on garrison dispositions and the key passes and strongholds of the land, and none but the Prefect might look at it. Zhuo Siheng's rank was high enough to see the map of Anhua Commandery, but to see the country round about was another matter. And now, while Zhuo Siheng seemed to be most earnestly following along with Lord He's tour of the sights, his eyes were racing over the whole map, skimming and sliding across it as if to fix every inch he saw in his mind.

Then, when the Prefect's inspection of the commandery truly set out, Zhuo Siheng, map in hand with Lord He's own notes on it, led Pan Guangling on a route that skirted every one of the marked inscriptions and stopped at not a single one to look.

"My lord, you'll owe Lord He poems and the like when you're back. If you don't so much as glance at these places, how will you answer for it?" Pan Guangling, following at the heels of the long-striding Zhuo Siheng, couldn't help worrying.

Zhuo Siheng only smiled. "Half a month ago I wrote home and had my younger brother, who's at his academy, send me some of the poems he and his schoolmates had written for their lessons. We should have them about the time we head back. I'll change them a little then, swap a few words, pass one hill off as another, and call them things I dashed off on the local tour. At Lord He's level he'll never catch it."

Faced with Lord Zhuo and his sleight of hand, clever to the point of the uncanny, Pan Guangling felt his own worry had been a fool's.

Beside him, Lord Zhuo's own servant, a boy who looked no more than fourteen or fifteen, was far calmer, as if long used to these dazzling turns of Zhuo Siheng's, without the least surprise.

"But... does it not gall you, my lord?" Pan Guangling caught up with Zhuo Siheng, no longer able to hold the question down.

"Gall me?" Zhuo Siheng turned to look at him. "Why would you think it galls me?"

"You hold great plans in your heart, my lord, and carry great talent, yet to put either to use you have to bow and scrape and bend your brow. Does that not gall you?" The mountain road was empty, and once Pan Guangling got going his feeling carried him, his voice coming faster and faster. "I know better than anyone, after five years in Anhua, what sort of man Lord He is! He's done no great wrong, but he never acts. He fobs everything off on others, and cares for nothing but his own little wind-and-moonlight scribbling. Wherever he's posted he never looks into the farming or the country's affairs, and never asks a thing about the business of the six offices. If nothing else, he's been in Anhua two full terms, over six years, and can't speak a word of the local tongue! When some case needs trying in the hall, he has to have a man interpret before he can so much as talk to the people. How is a governing official like that fit for anything? And that's not the worst. His own airs of refinement weren't enough for him. He's led the whole commandery's officials, high and low, down this same idle road, with himself at the head, and who dares not follow? Since he came, every official great and small has taken to poring over verse and parallel prose to win his favor, and even when there's real business to discuss they bring out some allusion that has nothing to do with anything. Let that go on long enough and it can never be set right! You've seen for yourself what the yamen is now. Is that not Lord He's fault?"

Zhuo Siheng laughed aloud when he'd heard him out. "What you want to say is, 'The King of Yue loved valor, and his people made light of death. The King of Chu loved slender waists, and the land was full of starvelings.' Eh? Officer Pan, do you think I've used my Han Feizi to the point or not?"

Pan Guangling was a hot-tempered man, and after pouring out all that heartfelt talk on others' behalf it was like punching cotton. All his sense of wrong stuck fast in his chest, past telling how wretched it felt. Seeing his face, Zhuo Siheng stopped teasing. He slowed and walked beside him, and said soothingly, "A thousand men, a thousand faces. Serve in office and you'll meet all sorts. If you set yourself against every one of them in a temper like this, won't you wear yourself out before you ever get to do what you mean to? Save your real anger for the ones who take bribes and bend the law and do violence to what's right. For a man like Lord He, rather than get angry, where's the harm in hearing out a few of his useless words?"

"But Lord He, for all he takes no bribes and bends no law, is rotten in ability too. How is he fit to do any good for the common people?" Pan Guangling still couldn't accept it.

"Then let me ask you. What's the purpose of this journey of ours?" Zhuo Siheng reached out as he walked and plucked a vine leaf, turned it in his fingers, and passed it to Chen Rong, signaling him to keep it safe. He meant to take this unknown flowering plant, with its spread-open leaf, back for his sister to make a bookmark.

"To look into the four counties, learn the people's circumstances, feel out the country ways, find where the good and the harm lie. Do all that, and only then can we know both them and ourselves, and truly do fitting and useful work for Anhua Commandery." These were the words Zhuo Siheng had said to Pan Guangling before they set out, and hearing them then his blood had seemed to catch fire, for it seemed he'd finally found a superior who meant to do real work.

"And what do we need to do all that?" Zhuo Siheng brought out the patience Zhuo Yan had once used in teaching him.

Pan Guangling lifted his head. "We need to be careful and give our whole hearts to it, not shrink from hard work, let no detail slip and leave no gap, and truly walk the whole land on our own two feet to look into it."

"Very good. And how do we let no detail and no gap slip? By following the map to every spot and going through every village and stockade, of course. Only then can we say we've done what we set out to. Without the map, on our two legs alone, we couldn't even meet that first condition. But if we'd asked Lord He straight out for the map, it would smack of overstepping our office, and make it look as though we were the diligent, hard-working ones and he the shirker. He'd never have helped us then. Far better a couple of easy, flattering words placed just right, and the fine tool drops into your hand. You and I... it isn't as if we were being asked to sell our honor as subjects and do a tyrant's work, the sort of thing against all principle that can never be done. Sometimes, to reach your end, a little bend in the road is the faster shortcut. So long as the end is sound, that's no betrayal of the sages' books we've read."

When Pan Guangling heard a point beyond what he could take in, he'd open his mouth and look a little dazed. Zhuo Siheng patted his shoulder and called him back. "Look. All through the counties and villages now, no one gives us trouble, and no one treats us as green newcomers to fob off and run rings around. The records and papers we want to see come easy to hand. All the time we save that would've gone on wrangling and sliding between the ranks, we can spend walking a few more places. Isn't that more real work done? And we owe that to Lord He's arrangements. So what do I have to be galled about? I'll not be too easy, mind. For now let's just get on the road. There's plenty more waiting for us to do."

In fairness, Zhuo Siheng had no liking at all for the temper of Anhua Commandery, or for He Mengchun who'd set it going. But he thought the man was not really complicated, and even easy to use. Taken up as a figurehead to do real work under, he'd be no hindrance. Handled right, he might even lend a hand. So why go to the trouble of crossing and resisting him?

In the end, it came down to keeping first things first, and weighing the people's livelihood and the business of government ahead of his own moods.

But a point like that, said straight out, Pan Guangling might not take in. You had to prove it to him in careful detail with real examples before a man like him would be brought round.

For all that he was too blunt and couldn't bend, he was good material. At the least his heart and his conduct were both upright, and that alone was a rare thing.

And he was the son of Lord Zeng's old friend, which added a tie of feeling. However hard he was to talk round, Zhuo Siheng would find a way to get his honest meaning through.

Pan Guangling had one good point, though. Once a thing was made plain to him, he could turn the corner at once. Whatever the matter, there was a brisk, headlong drive in his temper, and he'd put his head down and do it, with no mind for empty theory. Zhuo Siheng rather thought it a nature well suited to work in the provinces.

As they talked, crossing range after high range along the mountain road, Pan Guangling filled in for Zhuo Siheng much of what Chen Rong had not covered about the country here, along with old doings and old policies of the government, told out in full, down to the last detail.

"The first place you'll go, my lord, Tingyan County, is on the north slope of Futing Mountain." Pan Guangling traced a winding line across the map with his finger. He found now that the more he looked at this dotted map, the better it pleased his eye. "Only we can't go straight there. We cross the valley first by the mountain path, then press on, about half a day's mountain road, with two villages along the way to put up for the night."

Zhuo Siheng looked up at the sky. "It's not noon yet, so we needn't stop. I'd like to go and see the county's crag kiln first, and come back to the two villages on the way home." He needed to take his questions onto the road with him, to leave himself more time to think.

Pan Guangling thought it odd, but he'd asked too many questions today already. To go on chattering would, first, make him look a fool, and second, he could trust nothing now more than Lord Zhuo's own plans. He only said yes and did as he was told.

"Guangling, I heard from the local people that Futing Mountain's rock tea grows only on the south slope, and that there's not a single tea tree on the north. Why is that?"

This was something Chen Rong had told him.

Zhuo Siheng's asking a question of his own accord, and one that fell right in his own line of work, lit up Pan Guangling's eyes, and he roused himself to answer. "Look at the map, my lord. The sea wind blows in from Yongming and Chaoping on the coast, but two mountains stand in its way. One is Dongmu Mountain, running north and south between Chaoping and our commandery. The other is Futing Mountain, running east and west with a bend, between Yongming and us. The two ranges wall Anhua Commandery in tight. They block not just men but the damp sea wind and the heavy rains, so the tea tree, which loves damp, cannot grow on the dry, rain-poor north slope of Futing. But that same thing makes the north slope's soil dry and loose and short of water, which happens to suit it for clay bodies and firing porcelain."

Zhuo Siheng nodded and said no more. This time Pan Guangling felt Lord Zhuo had turned all at once heavy with thought.

What he did not know was that this crag kiln, and the coarse clay porcelain it fired, were the very question the emperor had set Zhuo Siheng to answer on this posting out.