Chapter 43 of 90
Into the Bandit Reeds
"Young master…"
Uncle Zhong's good eye came open slowly, and found Li Yuguo's face, and something in the old man's own face eased. "Yes… it's you, young master."
Three days ago, Uncle Zhong would not have called him that. Three days ago he had stood in the crowd at the city gate with his arms folded and called him the King of Soft Rice along with everyone else. But since then, everyone who worked these fields had eaten. Every day, a full dou of flour, as promised, weighed out fair on the scale at sundown. A man's opinion of another man can change a great deal in three days of eating.
"Uncle Zhong." Li Yuguo looked past him, out over the ruined ditches, and counted. Thirty. Forty, perhaps. Sitting in the dirt, nursing their heads. He had hired a hundred. "Why are there so few people all of a sudden?"
"They were taken." The old man's voice cracked. "Caught. By the water bandits."
He was bleeding while he spoke. There was a hole in his scalp above the ear, a ragged split where something heavy had come down on it, and the blood had not stopped. It ran in a slow, steady line down his neck and into the collar of his coat.
"There's a stockade on the west side of the Nalan River," he said. "Up past the bend, where the reeds are. They came down this morning, a whole crowd of them, with boats and harpoons. They said they'd come to collect taxes. They said the water we're digging for comes down from their stretch of the river, from their upper reaches—so if we want to drink it, or pour it on our fields, we have to pay them. And when we said we had nothing, they took the young ones. The strong ones. For labor, they said. Until we paid."
Li Yuguo laughed. It was a cold, short, ugly sound.
"A gang of river rats," he said, "demanding taxes. High-sounding ones, too. Water rights." He shook his head. "Nalan City is starving. The County Lord herself has suspended collections this year, because there's nothing left in anyone's pockets to collect. And these water bandits think they can charge a toll on the river."
Uncle Zhong frowned. He shifted, wincing. "Wait a moment, young master… that's not right. The head tax—isn't it still collected every year?"
Li Yuguo went still.
"Huh? Who told you that?"
"Nobody had to tell us. The clerks come door to door. Every month, regular as the moon." The old man looked at him, puzzled. "Every household. A few coppers for each mouth. If you can't pay, they take a pot, or a chicken, or a blanket."
The King of Thieves had been standing a little way off, masked, with his cloak drawn around him and his single eye moving over the ruined field. Now he came over without a sound and bent close to Li Yuguo's ear.
"The officers who collect it," he murmured, "are Li Yutang's."
Li Yuguo nodded slowly.
It was not a surprise. Not really. He had written Li Yutang himself, years ago in another world; he had known from the first page that the man was rotten. But it was one thing to know it in outline and another to be kneeling in the dirt beside an old man's blood and hear it from his mouth. Every month. Regular as the moon. A pot, or a chicken, or a blanket. From a city that could not feed itself. In the County Lord's name, under the County Lord's banner. And not one copper of it had ever reached the treasury that Nalan Meng counted every night by candlelight.
So that's where the money goes.
"It seems that this guy has been using the banner of Nalan City to do a great many bad things," he said quietly. He stood up and brushed off his knees. "Let's go. The water village first. There are people in that stockade who matter. But listen—" he looked at the King of Thieves "—the villagers must not be hurt. Not one."
"I—I'll go too!"
Jun Xue was already on her feet. She had been kneeling by a woman with a cut scalp, pressing a rag to it, and she stood up so fast that the rag fell into the dirt.
"No," said Li Yuguo. "You stay here."
"But young master—"
"Look around you." He said it gently. "There are so many hurt. Uncle Zhong's head. That man's arm. Somebody has to bind them up, and you've got clever hands. It's just a gang of water bandits. The King of Thieves and I are more than enough to deal with them."
She stared at him. Her thin face was pinched and stubborn. For a moment he thought she would argue. Then she pressed her lips together and nodded, hard, once.
"Okay," she said. "Okay. Then, young master—you have to be careful!"
"Don't worry." He smiled at her. "I'll be back before your bandages are dry."
He turned and walked off toward the riverbank with the King of Thieves at his shoulder, and did not look back.
Uncle Zhong watched him go.
He watched the straight back, and the dust on the boots, and the easy, unhurried stride of a man who was walking toward forty bandits with harpoons as if he were walking to market. He watched until the two of them had gone over the rise and out of sight among the reeds.
"Well," he murmured. "It seems the young master has really turned his back on being a prodigal son…"
"He was never a prodigal son!"
The old man blinked. Jun Xue had turned on him with a roll of bandage in one hand and a little pot of salve in the other, and her face was fierce.
"Not really," she said. "Not in his heart. Everything he did before, there was a reason for it. And everything he's doing now—" She stopped. Her chin came up. "He's the one who brought the flour, isn't he? He's the one who's paying you. He's the one who went to get your sons back."
She knelt down beside him, and pulled the strap of her little shoulder bag around, and took out a clean pad of cloth and a roll of bandage. She had packed the bag herself that morning. Bandages, salve, a needle and thread, a little knife. She had packed it every morning since she had come into Li Yuguo's service, because the young master was always getting hurt, and somebody had to.
Uncle Zhong smiled. It pulled at his split lip. "The little girl is very fierce about her young master."
"Of course," said Jun Xue. "When I was dying, he picked me up. He healed me. He gave me my name. So I'm his servant. That's all." She pressed the pad against his scalp. "Hold still."
"Only that?" said Uncle Zhong, with an old man's slyness, because the girl was so earnest and he wanted to see her bristle. "Only loyalty, eh? A servant's loyalty? He's lucky. Half the servants in this city would have run off by now."
"Then half the servants in this city are fools," said Jun Xue, and yanked the bandage tight.
"Ow! Oh—oh, it hurts! Little girl, gently, gently—my old bones!"
"Then don't move your head." She did not loosen it. But her hands went careful again, wrapping the cloth around and around, neat and firm. And when she had tied it off, she sat back on her heels and looked out toward the river, toward the place where the reeds had swallowed her young master, and her small face was white with worry.
On the bank of the Nalan River, Li Yuguo walked in front.
The river here was low and brown and sluggish, shrunk back from its banks by a year of drought, so that a broad strip of cracked mud ran along each side of it, gray and stinking in the sun. The reeds grew tall along the water line. Dragonflies hung above them, glittering. It was very quiet.
"It seems that Li Yutang," said the King of Thieves behind him, "is far more complicated than we thought."
Li Yuguo kicked a stone off the path. It skittered across the dry mud and plopped into the water.
"It's not going to be easy," he said, "to pull all his masks off at once. He's got a lot of them." He walked on. "Think about it. These bandits around the city—the horse thieves in the hills, the water village on the river—I'd bet every one of them has some kind of arrangement with him. More or less. Some share. Some favor. We're farming here, on open land, ten li from the walls. He knows that. Of course he does. Everyone in the city knows it." He glanced back. "You heard Uncle Zhong. Ordinary people have never paid a tax for drinking river water. Not in Nalan City. Not anywhere I've heard of. And now, all of a sudden, the very week we start digging, they have to pay. Isn't that too strange?"
"Obviously," said the King of Thieves.
"Yes," said Li Yuguo. "Obviously."
Neither of them said the rest of it. Neither of them needed to. They had walked together long enough now that the end of a thought could pass between them without words.
At the end of the long bend in the river, the water village came into view.
It was exactly what Uncle Zhong had said: a stockade spanning the river. A rambling, two-story heap of timber and reed-thatch built on piles driven into the mud, and on a crude wooden bridge that reached from bank to bank across a narrow stretch of the water. The upper floor was for living—Li Yuguo could see washing hung out to dry, smoke rising from a cookfire, a dog on a balcony. The lower floor was the river itself, open to the water between the pilings, with a dozen flat-bottomed boats tied up in the shade. Nets hung drying from the beams. Everything was gray and bleached and patched.
Not far from where they crouched in the reeds, a patrol was walking the bank. Five or six men. They were thin—very thin, with the stringy, hollow look of men who had not eaten properly in a long time—and barefoot, and wearing what had once been clothes. They carried harpoons and fish spears. One had a rusty sword with no scabbard, stuck through a length of rope at his waist.
"It's really poor," said the King of Thieves, in a low voice. "This water village."
"There are rich ones?"
"Of course. The water villages near the capital—" Guan Yunfan's single eye narrowed, remembering. "Two or three thousand men. Their strength is no less than a middling sect's. Everyone armed to standard, with real weapons. Proper boats, with sails. They have their own smiths. Some of them have their own cultivators." He snorted. "This can't compare. This is… how should I put it? A pile of stinking fish and rotten shrimp, all stuck together."
That was all Li Yuguo needed to hear.
He had a bottom line in his heart now. Without another word, he stood straight up out of the grass.
"Brother!" The King of Thieves grabbed at his sleeve and missed. "What are you doing?"
"What am I doing?" Li Yuguo brushed reed-fluff off his shoulders. "I'm going to draw their fire. You find your chance, and get the villagers out."
The King of Thieves stared at him. His face did something complicated under the mask, caught somewhere between laughing and crying.
"I'm saying—" he began, "don't you think you could use something other than yourself as bait—" He stopped. He sighed. "Fine. Then I'll go first."
And he was gone. Not running, not jumping. Simply not there. The reeds where he had been crouching swayed a little, as if a breeze had passed, and were still.
Li Yuguo shook his head, and smiled, and walked out onto the open mud.
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