Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 117

by Neil Clarke

  Ma Feng clapped his hands. “Excellent! We just need to make sure he has a convincing reason for being thrown in jail so the East City Institute doesn’t get suspicious. Too severe a crime and he won’t be leaving the dungeon. But it can’t be too light, either. At the minimum it needs to justify shackles and chains.”

  “Haha, that’s not a problem. This fellow spends all his time spewing unsought opinions and sowing slander online. His crime is ready-made.” Guo Wanchao gripped the armor at his crotch with one hand and turned to leave. “Well, keep today’s talk a secret between heaven, earth, you, and me. I’m off to find an internet monitor. I’ll bring the fellow over later. We’ll talk more next time. Farewell!”

  The general’s armor clanged as he swaggered out of the room, the contemptuous gazes of the scholars bouncing harmlessly off the backplate. Outside, the fire-oil chariot began its deafening rumble. Ma Feng wiped his sweaty face and sighed. “I do hope that taking care of the East City Institute will really be this simple. Our lives are at stake, everyone. We must act with caution! Caution!”

  3.

  Zhu Dagun didn’t know which magistrate had dispatched his captors, but as Minister Ma Feng had told him, the Department of Justice Penitentiary, the Taiyuan Circuit Prison, the Jinyang County Prison, and the Jianxiong Military Prison were all the same nowadays. Who was to blame but a government of such staggering incompetence that it managed to lose all twelve of its prefectures, with only the lone city of Jinyang left under its rule?

  As the soldiers dragged him through Xuanren Ward in chains, many curious gazes followed him through the cracks in the brothels’ boarded up doors. Who among the sisters, clients, and brothel keepers could fail to recognize the penniless scholar? Here was a scribe of the Hanlin Academy, living in the red-light district of all places. Perhaps it would be understandable in a man of passions, but despicably, he had not patronized the sisters even once in all these years. Every time he walked by, he would cover his eyes with his sleeve and quicken his steps, muttering “Sorry! Sorry!” One wondered if he was more embarrassed by the thought of his ancestors seeing his current circumstances, or by the thought of the Xuanren girls seeing whatever he hid in his pants.

  Only Zhu Dagun knew that the only thing he was ashamed of was his wallet. With the arrival of the Song army, the Hanlin Academy had cut off his monthly stipend. In the three months of siege, he had received only four pecks of rice and five strings of coins as remuneration for his writing. They called them hundred-strings, but he counted only seventy-seven lead coins on each of them. If he spent a night in the House of Warm Fragrance, he’d be eating chaff for the rest of the month. Besides, he had to pay for internet. He’d chosen his address not only for the cheap rent, but also for the convenience of the network. It had a network management station right on top of the back wall. If anything went haywire, all he had to do was kick the ladder and yell upward. The internet fee was forty coins a month, plus a few more to keep the network manager friendly. Outspending his income was a negligible concern when he couldn’t live a day without the internet.

  “What are you dragging your feet for? Move it!” Zhao Da yanked on the chain; Zhu Dagun stumbled forward, hurriedly covering his face with his hands as he went down the street. In a moment, they came out of the front gate of Xuanren Ward and turned to travel eastward along the wide thoroughfare of Zhuque Street. They saw few pedestrians, and none who paid any mind to a criminal in chains in this time of war and chaos. Zhu Dagun spent the walk hiding his face and cringing, terrified of bumping into a fellow Hanlin Academician. Fortunately, this was the hour after lunch, when everyone was napping with full bellies. He didn’t see a single scholar.

  “S-sir.” After a while, Zhu Dagun couldn’t resist asking in a small voice, “What am I under arrest for?”

  “What?” Zhao Da turned to glower at him. “Misinforming the public, starting rumors—did you think the government was ignorant of the trouble you were making online?”

  “Is it a crime for concerned citizens to discuss current affairs?” Zhu Dagun asked. “Besides, how does the government know what we say online?”

  Zhao Da laughed mirthlessly. “If it’s government business, there’s government people watching. You untitled little scribe, did you know that spreading slander and rumor about the current situation is a crime on the same level as inciting a disturbance at a governmental office or assaulting a minister? Besides, the internet is another novelty from the East City Institute. Naturally we have to be twice as cautious. You may think that the network manager’s there to keep the internet operating smoothly, but he’s writing down every word you send out in his dossier. It’s all there in black and white. Let’s see you try to wriggle out of it!”

  Shocked, Zhu Dagun fell silent.

  Chug chug chug chug. A fire-oil carriage rumbled past, spewing flame and smoke. It had “East City XII” painted on its side, marking it as one of the Institute’s repair vehicles.

  “The Song army is trying to storm the city again,” said one of the soldiers. “Nothing will come of it this time either, most likely.”

  “Shhh! Is it your place to talk about that?” His companion cut him off immediately.

  Ahead, a crowd was gathered around some sort of vendor stand set up under the shade of the willows. A smirking Zhao Da turned to one of his soldiers and said, “Liu Fourteenth, you should save up some money and get your face scrubbed. You’ll have more luck finding a wife.”

  Liu Fourteenth blushed. “Heh-heh . . . ”

  Zhu Dagun then knew that it was the East City Institute’s tattoo removal stand. The emperor was afraid of the Han soldiers deserting, so he had their faces tattooed with the name of their army divisions. The Jianxiong soldiers were tattooed “Jianxiong;” the Shouyang soldiers were tattooed “Shouyang.” As for Liu Fourteenth, a homeless wanderer who’d been enlisting in every army he could find since boyhood, his face was inked shiny black from forehead to chin with the characters of every army that had ever patrolled this land. The only blank spot left was his eyeballs; if he wanted to enlist again in the future, he’d have to shave himself bald and start tattooing his scalp.

  The East City prince’s tattoo removal method had the soldiers rushing to line up. The technique involved taking a thin needle dipped in a lye solution and pricking the skin all over. The scabs were peeled off, and the skin again brushed with lye solution before being wrapped with cloth. The second set of scabs then healed to reveal clean new skin. It was precisely due to the unease of being under siege that everyone wanted a wife to enjoy while they could. Prince Lu’s invention showed his deep understanding of the soldiers’ thoughts.

  The procession walked a bit farther, then harnessed an oxcart at Youren Ward and continued east by cart. Zhu Dagun sat on a stuffed hemp sack, bouncing with every bump in the road, the chains scraping his neck raw. Deep inside, a little part of him couldn’t help but regret accepting the mission. He and the General of the Cavalry Guo Wanchao counted as old acquaintances. Their ancestors had been ministers together under old Emperor Gaozu Liu Zhiyuan. The fortunes of their families had gone opposite ways in the time since, but now and then they’d still simmer some wine and talk of things past.

  That day, when Guo Wanchao invited him over, he’d been utterly unprepared to see Minister Ma Feng sitting there as well. Ma Feng wasn’t just anyone—his daughter was the emperor’s beloved concubine, such that the emperor even referred to him as father-in-law. It hadn’t been long since he’d stepped down from the position of Chancellor for the sinecure of Xuanhui Minister. In all of Jinyang, aside from a few self-important generals and military governors with soldiers under their command, no others could equal his status and power.

  After a few rounds of wine, Ma Feng explained to him what they had in mind. Zhu Dagun immediately threw his cup to the floor and jumped up. “Isn’t this treason?”

  “Sima Wengong once said, ‘Loyalty is to give all oneself for the well-being of another.’ Yanzi also said that ‘Being a loy
al minister means advising one’s lord well, not dying with one’s lord.’ One should not take shelter under a wall on the verge of falling. Brother Zhu, consider your gains and losses carefully, for the sake of the people of the city . . . ” Old Ma Feng held on to Zhu Dagun’s sleeve, his whiskers trembling as he sermonized.

  “Sit down! Sit down! Who do you think you’re fooling with that performance?” Guo Wanchao hawked out a glob of phlegm. “All you scholars are the same. Powerless to make any difference, you spend all day on the internet pontificating and debating, criticizing the emperor for never doing anything right, and lamenting that Han is going to collapse sooner or later. And now all of a sudden you can’t bear to hear a word against the emperor? To put it bluntly, once the Song dogs storm the city, everyone in it is motherfucking dead. Better to surrender while we can and save tens of thousands of lives. Do you really need me to spell this out for you?”

  Awkwardly, Zhu Dagun stood there, unwilling to either acquiesce by sitting or to defy the general by leaving. “But Prince Lu has those machines on the city walls. Jinyang is well-fortified, and I hear a grain shipment from Liao arrived a few days ago from the Fen River. We can hold out for at least several more months—”

  Guo Wanchao spat. “You think Prince Lu is helping us? He’s screwing us over! Those Song dogs now control the Central Plains. They have enough grain and money to keep the siege going for years. Back in the third month, a Song army crushed the Khitan at Baima Ridge, killing their Prince of the Southern Domain Yelu Talie. The Khitan are too scared to come out of Yanmen Pass now. Once the Song army cuts off the Fen and Jing Rivers, Jinyang will be completely isolated. How are we supposed to win? Besides, who knows where that East City prince came from, with all his strange devices. Does he really only care about helping us defend the city? I don’t think so!”

  For a time, none spoke. A fire-oil lamp crackled on the table, illuminating the small room’s walls. The lamp was another one of Prince Lu’s inventions, naturally. A few coins’ worth of fire-oil could keep it burning until dawn. Its smoke smelled acrid and stained the ceiling a greasy black, but it burned far brighter than a vegetable seed oil lamp.

  “What do you want me to do?” Zhu Dagun slowly sat.

  “Try to reason with him first, and if that doesn’t work, whip out your knife. Isn’t that how things are always done?” Guo Wanchao said, raising his cup.

  4.

  Prince Lu’s origin was a complete mystery. No one had heard of him before the Song army surrounded the city. Then, after the loss of the twelve prefectures, stories of the East City Institute began to circulate through the wards. Seemingly overnight, countless novelties sprang up in Jinyang, three of which grabbed the most attention: the massive water wheel and foundry in Central City, the defensive weaponry on the city walls, and the city-spanning internet.

  Jinyang was divided into three parts, West, Central, and East. Central City straddled the Fen River; the water wheel was installed right under a veranda, turning night and day with the river’s flow. Water wheels had long been used to irrigate fields and mill grain, but who knew that they had so many other uses? Squeaking wooden cogs drove the foundry’s bellows, and the water-dragons, fire-dragons, capstans, and gliding carts atop the city walls. The foundry held several furnaces, where the bellows blasted air over iron molten by fire-oil. The resulting iron was hard and heavy, far more convenient than before.

  The changes were even greater on the city walls. Prince Lu had laid down a set of parallel wooden rails atop the wall and ran a strong rope along the track from end to end. Press down a spring-loaded lever, and the power of the water wheel drove the rope to pull a cart sliding along the track at lightning speed. The trip from Dasha Gate to Shahe Gate normally took an hour even on a fast horse, but with the gliding cart it took only five minutes. On the system’s maiden trip, the soldiers tied to the cart as the first passengers had screamed in terror, but a few more trips showed them the fun in it. With exposure came appreciation; they became the gliding cart operators, spending all day aboard the cart and refusing to get off. There were five carts in total, three for passengers and two for catapults. The catapults weren’t much different from the preexisting Han ones, except that they used the water wheel to winch back the throwing arm, not fifty strong men hauling on the oxhide rope; and they no longer threw stones, but pig bladders filled with fire-oil. Each bladder also contained a packet of gunpowder wrapped in oil cloth, with a protruding fuse that was lit right before firing.

  Throwing down rocks and wooden beams was a staple of siege defense, but every beam dropped and rock hurled meant one less in the city. If the siege went on long enough, the defenders usually had to take apart houses in the city for things to throw. Therefore, the East City Institute came up with a vicious new invention. Instructed by Prince Lu, the defenders tamped yellow mud into big clay pillars, five feet long and two feet across, and embedded the surfaces with iron caltrops. The construction of the mud pillars followed a specific recipe: yellow mud was covered with straw mats to stew for a week; mixed with glutinous rice paste, chopped-up straw, and pig’s blood; and then pounded down repeatedly. The caltrops studding the pillars were doused with wastewater until they rusted an unnatural red-black. Prince Lu said that they’d make the Song soldiers catch a disease called “tetanus.” Weighing two thousand six hundred pounds each, glistening a sinister yellowish bronze color, and covered all over with filthy iron caltrops, the pillars turned out to be excellent weapons for slaughter. Hundreds of pillars were secured to the top of the wall with iron chains on each end. When the Song army approached, the pillars smashed down, pulverizing scaling ladders, rams, shields, and soldiers alike. Then, with a turn of the capstan, the water wheel winched the chains with little squeaks, and the bloodstained pillars ascended sedately toward the parapets once more.

  After suffering great casualties from the pillars, the Song army changed tactics and sent Khitan captives and their own old, weak, and sick to serve as the vanguard. Taking advantage of the brief respite after their sacrifices were flattened and while the pillars were still down, the main body of the Song army advanced with ladders, siege towers, and catapults. But now the gliding cart-mounted catapults came into play. In a flash, hundreds of red, stinking, wobbling bladders took to the air, blooming into fireballs as they rained down among the Song troops. Wood crackled and soldiers screamed. The fragrance of meat roasted on fruit tree wood permeated the air. Last came the archers, sniping at anyone with a helmet plume—everyone knew that only Song officers could wear feathers on their helmet. But arrows were limited and had to be used conservatively; once the archers had shot a couple arrows each, they returned to rest, thus ending the battle.

  Below the city walls was a field of char, smoke, and wailing. Above, the Han defenders poked and pointed into the distance, counting their kills. For every kill, they drew a black circle on their hand, and used the circles to collect their reward money from the East City Institute. By Prince Lu’s calculations, two million Song soldiers had died these months below the city. Everyone else, looking at the Song camps that still covered the horizon end to end, came to an unspoken consensus not to bring up the problem with statistics derived from self-reporting.

  With Jinyang securely defended, Prince Lu invented the internet to keep everyone in the city from getting too bored. He first came up with something called movable type (which he claimed was cribbing from an old sage named Bi Sheng, although no one could recall ever having heard of this formidable personage). He’d first carved the text of the Thousand Character Classic in bas relief onto a wooden board, then pressed a layer of yellow mud mixed with glutinous rice, straw, and pig’s blood—leftover material from the death-dealing clay pillars—over the printing plate. Finally, he’d peeled the whole thing off and diced it into small rectangles, thus creating a set of individual type blocks that could be freely combined and assembled. He’d placed the thousand characters into a rectangular tray, attaching every block in the back to a strand of sil
k thread with a spring. The thousand strands of thread were then collected into a bundle the thickness of a wrist, termed a “web.”

  Similar text-trays were found all over the city, while the bundles of silk threads passed through the bottoms of the walls to a network manager’s station. The end of each bundle of silk was then neatly fitted into a metal mesh by tying a small hook to the end of each thread and hanging the hooks to the mesh. These meshes lined the walls of a station, and if two text trays wanted to communicate, the manager found the two corresponding bundles and brought the metal meshes together with a twist that connected the thousand pairs of metal hooks together. The bundles were thus linked together in what Prince Lu called an “internet.”

  Once a web connection was established, the users at each end could communicate through the text trays. When one side pressed down on one of the type pieces, the little spring tugged the silk thread, causing the corresponding type to sink down on the other side. Although picking out the desired character out of a thousand densely packed blocks posed quite a strain on the operator’s eyes, an experienced user could type with lightning speed. Some pedants worried that the depth and complexity of hanzi writing could not be adequately represented by such an invention. Though the Thousand Character Classic was an ingenious primer to introduce the wonders of hanzi, how could a mere one thousand characters be enough to discuss life and the universe? Prince Lu countered that they were one thousand unique characters—never mind discussing the universe, these characters had been enough for the majority of fine essays since antiquity; they were certainly enough for web users to express whatever they needed to say.

  In actuality, in the Thousand Character Classic, one of the characters—the one for “pure”—did occur twice. The East City Institute removed one of them and substituted a piece of type with a bent arrow symbol. Since it would have been too difficult for two users to simultaneously type and squint at the text tray for a reply, Prince Lu decreed that the current speaker had to press this “carriage return” block when they finished typing to indicate that it was the other person’s turn. Why the symbol was called “carriage return” was something Prince Lu never bothered to explain.