Chapter 89

"He's my younger brother. He's my own kin." Siheng's answer was short and plain.

"Does my lord know what everyone else calls him?" Lu Hui's voice was as soft as the falling rain. "They call him the Butcher-Constable."

Siheng did not answer. He had learned the name half a year back, from Huiheng's letters and from the court gazette.

Gao Yongqing was only a county lieutenant of Jinchuan County, in Wuning Commandery of Weizhou, yet he had reached his hand into a great many of the weighty local cases. Wuning Commandery lay on the frontier, and the prefecture kept a garrison of fifty thousand, with the soldiers' own families settled nearby, clearing waste land and pushing out the border, so the district was fairly thick with people. It bordered several loose-rein frontier zones, and cases were many. Gao Yongqing judged and cut them through with a thunderbolt's speed and no hesitation, and whenever a case touched the prefectural troops he ruled on it all the same, and always on the heavy side. A good many local officers could not stomach it, and sent up memorials impeaching him for cruel punishments and savage justice, calling him the Butcher-Constable of the county. The memorials went up. But the military-farm districts, which he had scoured hardest of all, stayed silent.

The emperor, holding to neither side, had Gao Yongqing answer for himself. He sent back a memorial saying only that a thousand men saying yes were not worth one man saying no, and laid out one by one the count of the cases he had tried, of which fully half were years-old matters closed at his hands, not fresh ones newly raised. Under his handling the county jail had been swept clean, and in three months not a thief or petty rogue had offended again.

That had happened half a year ago, and the uproar had died down since. The reason it was spoken of again lately was that a shipment of army grain had gone missing in Weizhou, and Gao Yongqing, judging the case to its end, had caught the men with the goods and netted the whole lot, the fierce bandits and the escort officers who'd colluded with them, in one haul. The emperor was well pleased, and raised him three ranks at a stroke, out of the usual course, to Judicial Commissioner. There were voices against it, but his merit was there before all eyes, and the lost army grain had been a hot coal no one dared touch, which he had brought off single-handed, so those who'd kept quiet earlier had little ground to put in a word now.

But the name of Butcher-Constable followed Gao Yongqing like a shadow to the prefecture.

"We've only heard the local officers call him that, and never heard how the common people speak of him. Every man speaks his own piece. Were one in Weizhou to hear the talk from another quarter, it might come out quite the other way." Siheng did not believe Gao Yongqing a dull officer venting some aimless rage. If his aim had not been clear, he would never have taken so extreme a course.

But Siheng knew better still that there was a stubborn, cutting edge in Gao Yongqing's nature, bound up with his life and his choices, and very hard to strip away.

Lu Hui thought a long while before he said, "Had it been my lord acting, you'd surely not have stirred up so much aimless rage."

"And had it been me, I might not have cleared so many long-buried cases in so short a time." Siheng never doubted Gao Yongqing's ability.

At that Lu Hui gave a rare small smile. "Only today do I learn that my lord's heart, like anyone else's in the world, is grown a little crooked."

Siheng was a touch startled, and caught of course that Lu Hui was teasing him for the way his words had shielded Gao Yongqing. How could he not know he was straining a little to argue for a thing whose roots he didn't know? He let out a wry, helpless laugh. "To know a man's hardships and his bitterness, and then still weigh what he did and didn't do fair and even, that's a justice only a sage can manage. I'm just a worldly man, and I can't turn a cold eye and a cold word on my own kin and friends."

"Have I touched on a sore place for my lord?" Lu Hui said, sobering. "I beg your pardon."

Siheng looked at him very gently. "You've put your finger on where I'm guilty, rather. Qing and I were brought together by our fathers while they still lived, and the bond between us is no ordinary one, so I can't help shielding him with my words. You're right that I ought sometimes to weigh the good and the bad of a thing more coolly, if I'm truly to think a matter through to its root for someone's sake."

What Siheng did not say was that he and Gao Yongqing, hemmed in by what their stations were, could hardly reach each other at all, and that even if he truly wished to send a word of warning he had no way to speak it. That was the real helplessness of it.

Lu Hui nodded, as if he had grasped something, and after a while said, "It's a strange chance, too. It was this very Lord Gao who found out that someone had gone from Jinzhou to Weizhou at the autumn exam before, with his home registry changed, to sit the test there. This was Weizhou's first year with an examination compound of its own, and some, reckoning that a frontier place like Weizhou had few men of learning and would be easy ground to stand out in, quietly spent money and worked their connections to go and sit there. Lord Gao caught one of them red-handed. And that was what dragged the Jinzhou prefectural school's scandal into the light, and showed that the learning of our prefecture had long been rotted through, which stirred the emperor's great wrath, and his judgment struck men down, and left the post empty that my lord is now to fill."

Lu Hui knew well that Gao Yongqing and Siheng had been at pains all along to keep clear of each other, and that this surely had not been some move made in collusion, but the thing was such a chance that it was hard for anyone not to turn it over in the mind.

And Siheng, of course, caught his drift, and slowed the already ambling horse a further notch, and said softly to Lu Hui, now riding abreast of him, "The one appointing me is the Ministry of Personnel, and the one who gave the nod is the sovereign. Any deeper meaning in it is a matter of the will above. If I'm not wrong, this scandal likely reaches to the Imperial Academy and the Grand Academy too, so the thought of overhauling the whole of education may well have stirred up above. I've already written home to ask, and if word comes, I'll lay my plans then."

Lu Hui was impressed in his heart. Sharp as he was, he felt he could do no more than find the problem, while Siheng was forever a step ahead in his thinking, and had made himself ready for whatever straits and troubles might come, which was a clear, far seeing he knew he could not match.

They finished talking as the rain let up. Reckoning they had still less than a day's road left, they decided against resting and rode on.

In truth neither man was setting foot in Yongming City for the first time. Siheng's earlier visit had been to report on He Mengchun's work, only a year ago, and he had come then with Pan Guangling, the two of them pressed and hurried, eager to get back and oversee the digging of the sisal pools, so he had not met Pan's father. Wang Botang, Prefect of Jinzhou, had been away in the Jiangnan prefecture on business, so the two had never set eyes on each other.

Coming into the city this time, the busy sea-port was still a place of a thousand sails racing to meet, its harbor roads open and thronged, showing all the fat richness of the south. Siheng could not help thinking that whoever held the office of Maritime Trade Supervisor here had a soft berth of it, and might well enjoy a thing before the sovereign himself had laid hands on it. But the more open the gain in a place like that, the more eyes were fixed on it, and few dared play fast and loose. It was nothing like the education office he was bound for, which was both a close concern of men's careers and a tangle of hidden stakes and crossed interests, knotted deep and hard to sound. To stir up the waters there, he would need some real skill.

Thinking so, he and Lu Hui came to the prefectural yamen. They had scarcely dismounted when men came to meet them, saying that Prefect Wang and Administrator Pan were waiting in person, and begging the new Education Intendant to come and pay his respects at once.

"You go first and look over the education office, and if there's time, see to the prefectural school as well. The prefecture's set a residence aside for me, and I've arranged for Chen Rong to bring your mother along to Yongming City to live with you, so you can show your gifts and do your duty to her at once, without the toil of running between two places." Seeing the startled, then glad, light in Lu Hui's eyes, Siheng hurried to stop his thanks. "You're my younger brother too. My heart was crooked from the start."

With that he smiled, and went alone to meet Wang Botang, the Prefect who had married a daughter of the Tang house.

Prefect Wang was thirty-seven this year, and to have reached a fifth-rank prefect's chair by now was luck in office not to be scorned. Beside him Pan Weishan looked worn and aged, coughing now and then, perhaps for the damp close heat of the spring rains, and seeming not quite well. But one look at that dark, square face was enough to mark him as Pan Guangling's own father, the two could not have been more alike. Wang Botang's smile was warm and easy. He was tall but a touch gaunt, and looked truly worn down, seeming to walk on eggshells since the emperor's rebuke over the great business in the prefecture. He received the junior's bow from Siheng, and courteously asked him to sit, and spoke first of the arrangements for his residence, bidding him set his mind at rest over his lodging and not trouble himself.

"Rather than trouble myself over lodging, what I fear more is the state of the prefectural school." Siheng asked it with the look of a man taking the world's cares on before all others. "I've come to my post in haste, and still don't know the truth of things, so I hope you two lords will set me right and tell me how it stands, that I may lay my plans."

"The school has been hit very hard. The case is wretched, and were it not so, I'd not have begged the Ministry so urgently for an able man to take it in hand." Wang Botang put away his smile and sighed heavily. "In Anhua you had the plan for an academy already, Intendant Zhuo, so you must have thought much on matters of learning. You may well be the very man to cure our school's long sickness!"

And he went on to dwell on the troubles of the school and the education office just now, which did sound truly grave. There was a want of men, of officers, of clerks, of teachers. The enrolled students, afraid of being dragged into the scandal, had every one with a thread of connection to pull fled away. The office's funds were deep in the red, next to nothing left.

In short: short of men, short of money, short of virtue, and see what you can do about it yourself.

With that, Wang Botang heaved a long sigh, but settled himself back in his seat and watched Siheng quietly, as if awaiting his response.

Back in the day, that smiling knife-in-the-sleeve by which Siheng had brought down Cui Lu had come so wholly out of nowhere. If Siheng meant to play the same hand again now, Wang Botang seemed at his ease and ready for it, as though he'd been expecting it all along.

What he got was a thunderclap.

Siheng struck the side table hard, his face thick with rage, every trace of his earlier worry and gloom flung who knew where, and roared, "How dare these local officers carry on so? Vying after private gain, trafficking bribes in the open, lawless past all bounds! Without the least notion of what it is to revere the imperial statutes! Our Founder said, 'Learning is the state's great reckoning,' and said too, 'To let the work of learning fall to ruin is to blight the spring crop.' To flout the ancestral laws so is sheer unbridled insolence, without virtue and without the Way!"

Siheng had spent half a year copying the Veritable Records at the emperor's side, and could reel off at will the famous words of every wise ruler of the dynasty. Put to use here they rang out firm and struck home, and his two quotations landed with real weight, while the fierce, hard words sat not at all with the mild, gentle gentleman of common report.

As for Wang Botang, Siheng's reaction seemed to have caught him off guard, but after only a brief hesitation Siheng gave him no chance to recover, and pressed on. "Lord Wang, I don't say your governing was unclear or your men ill-chosen. I say the rot in the schools has been long in the making, and likely lay hidden before ever you came to your post. This time we must be of one heart, high and low, and set the learning of Jinzhou well to rights, so the emperor's ear may be clear and bright, and the scholars of Jinzhou have somewhere to shelter!" And with that he bowed again, low, and looked at Wang Botang with the air of one grieving for the whole world, as if, should Lord Wang not fall in with him, the emperor's ear would be clouded and every scholar under heaven left in dread.

Pan Weishan, seated to one side, began to cough, and to Siheng's ear old Pan was suffering worse from holding in his laughter than from any cough.

Everyone at court knew Siheng's ties with the Tang house, so he had only to keep things decent on the surface, work hard, show respect to his superior, and press on with the schooling, and that was enough. This was nothing like the Cui Lu affair, where the foe stood in the open and he in shadow and had to bide his time for the moment to strike.

With no one here he needed to bring down, who'd waste breath on hollow courtesies?

I'm no ambassador of peace to the court, Siheng thought, no almsgiver of the halls of state. I've no time for idle talk. Let Wang Botang understand now that setting the schools right will happen, and that on the real business he can either help or stay out of the way, or else there are any number of hats surnamed Wang he'd not dare to wear that I'm ready to clap on his head, so he'd best weigh it well first.

Siheng's sudden outburst and veiled threat caught Wang Botang off guard. He'd heard the Zhuo fellow was a smiling tiger who never spoke a hard word, but seeing was believing, and now he saw a man of deep, deep reserves, with a crafty, cutting edge that ill fit his years.

"If Intendant Zhuo puts it so, then my mind is at rest!" Wang Botang was no idler in his post either, and his show of being moved was, by the look of it, acting of the first water. He spoke earnestly, bidding Siheng by all means give himself free rein and not fail the emperor's hopes, and saying he would surely support him and never waver.

But Wang Botang's promise, made, amounted to no promise at all. It was, near enough, "every moral support, short of actual help."

Siheng was not flustered. He had never reckoned Wang Botang would give him money and men to start with, and had it truly been offered, that was when he'd have fretted over what trick lay in it.

Having heard out Lord Wang's consummate rigmarole, Siheng smiled at last, and smiled so firm and so sure that a sudden unease welled up in Wang Botang's breast.

This Zhuo Siheng gave off, from head to foot, an air of danger that made the hair stand on end.