Liu Cheng rested for three straight days. On the first two, he took the thirty-one men and Huyan Xiang to make several rounds of social calls among his Jingzhou colleagues. On the morning of his day off before the Willow-Shooting, he even invited Luo You to eat lotus roots, then that afternoon sought out the Secretaries he knew and joined them and the Black-Clad Guards for a farewell meal.
He also gave those Black-Clad Guards and several Secretaries gifts of copper coins, silk, swords, and books.
On the last day of the second month, the day of the Willow-Shooting, crowds that included many unaffiliated scholars and ordinary spectators surged toward the northwest of the city early in the morning. Yet the Chief Secretary of the Western Expeditionary General's Office, who had returned only three days earlier, took a dozen newly assigned Black-Clad Guards, hung the seals and ribbons of his offices as Founding Marquis and Chief Secretary at his waist, and left the city heading southeast. At Jinxiang, he boarded a flotilla of government vessels.
It had to be a flotilla.
Traveling with him were more than a hundred members of the Jiankang delegation, who had left Jiankang for Chang'an, followed him to Jixian, and now returned to Jiangling. Despite receiving considerable money, silk, and gifts, they had become numb to it all. There was also that three-tiered Commander's Staff and Tally tied with a willow twig.
Liu Acheng needed to return these people and that Commander's Staff and Tally to Jiankang on Huan Wen's behalf-he was a proper envoy of the court, after all, and had to report back to it.
They first sailed down to Dongting Lake, then turned south and headed upstream along the Xiang River toward Changsha. On the twelfth day of the third month, they