Gaining a foothold

Winter was approaching, and Liu Rengong and his Liu clansmen finally left the camp.

To be honest, it was an ugly scene!

Even though Liu Acheng and Liu Huzi had already coaxed and pressured many people into leaving, it was still an ugly scene... Women and children were crying everywhere, and many small households and women and children refused to listen to reason, insisting on following Liu Rengong and the others. No amount of persuasion worked. Telling them there was no food or shelter prepared for them there, that the authorities or garrison might very well drive them away—none of it helped. They were determined to follow Liu Rengong. They could not imagine how they would survive without this Refugee Commander.

Naturally, Liu Rengong cared about saving face. He did not even dare ride his horse, but kept his head down in the crowd, hiding his face behind the people on either side as he walked out. Even the Liu Clan Relatives showed no excitement at their impending deliverance. Instead, every one of them looked dejected, as though they were continuing their flight rather than going somewhere new to gain a foothold.

Under these circumstances, Liu Huzi could only let those people follow. He did not dare use force to stop them.

Liu Cheng did not stop them either.

It was not that he wanted to see them make fools of themselves.

Quite the opposite: he fully understood their distrust of him and dependence on Liu Rengong. Besides, in his view, Jiangcheng lay beside Jingkou Avenue and close to Jiankang, making it practically a small city. And a city, however small, would inevitably have a far greater capacity to absorb scattered people like these than this stretch of wilderness.

If these people really went to Jiangcheng, even without receiving aid, they would still find plenty of opportunities to survive. They might not fare any worse than if they stayed in camp.

The only problem was that the dying Grand Commander had brought back tens of thousands of refugees from the Huai River region this time, many of them scattered and unorganized. They were now all around Jingkou and would naturally disperse along Jingkou Avenue and the Canal, so those following Liu Rengong would face considerable competition for survival.

After all the commotion, everyone had finally left by noon.

Liu Acheng and Liu Jili then got to work, reorganizing the groups.

The group was both the smallest and the most essential unit in a refugee band. People gathered together, ate from the same pot, slept beside the same campfire, went out to work together, and entrusted their children to one another's care. Its importance could hardly be overstated.

Nor could the groups be assembled at random. Fairness mattered when distributing many supplies, so their numbers had to be kept as balanced as possible. But they could not simply copy the army's squads of five and ten either. They had to preserve families as much as possible, maintain ties of surname and neighborhood, and ensure that women and children were cared for. They could neither throw all the women and children together to fend for themselves nor blindly force them into groups. At the same time, they also had to consider special units such as the Straw-Sandal Group, the Tiger-Beating Team, the Washing Group, and even a Childcare Group devoted to looking after young children.

All that could be said was that, fortunately, Liu Rengong's camp had been reasonably well organized and left behind a sound framework. With a little patching and piecing together, it would do.

Fewer than a thousand people remained. Dividing them roughly into small groups of ten and large groups of twenty meant only sixty or seventy groups, and Liu Acheng had already made deliberate adjustments when people began leaving in large numbers a few days earlier. In theory, it should have been finished quickly. In practice, however, even something this simple produced one problem after another. This person did not want to eat from the same pot as that person; that person complained that this group had too many children. By the time the groups were assigned, the wrangling had dragged on until evening.

And they were not finished yet. The original camp had been built for three thousand people. With fewer than a thousand remaining, the sleeping areas and campfires clearly needed rearranging.

By then, however, the two Lius were utterly exhausted. There was simply no time to assign spaces, so they let everyone choose whatever nearby spot they liked, provided they did not fight over it. Then they returned to the central campfire, which now looked rather deserted. There was a group here too, and it had already been agreed that the two of them belonged to it, so someone had saved them food.

Liu Jili picked up his clay bowl and gulped down the porridge in a few mouthfuls. Looking thoroughly miserable, he could not help complaining with the empty bowl still in his hand. "There are too few workers. Before, with nearly three thousand people, every ten people had three or four male workers and four or five female workers-seven or eight workers altogether. Now, out of eight or nine hundred people, only three or four hundred count as workers..."

Hearing the figures, Liu Acheng, who was also holding his bowl, was visibly startled-not by the current proportion of workers, but by the former one. "We had that many workers before?"

"Didn't you know?" Liu Jili was utterly speechless. "If your band hadn't had enough workers, how could you have reached Jingkou so quickly? How could you have put up shelters and gathered firewood so easily?"

Liu Acheng was about to say something when a sudden jolt went through his mind. For no clear reason, he recalled something someone had said, and froze on the spot.

Back in the Huai River region, when Brother Qi, who had been taking his sheep to join the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice, was robbed, he had sprawled over the sheep and turned to tell Liu Acheng something about his father telling him he was the last person in the family. At the time, the words had seemed muddled. But Brother Qi had never been good with words, and that day he had been robbed and beaten. Although his account seemed disconnected, it hardly mattered. Besides, Liu Acheng had only wanted to hurry up and kill the robbers, so he had not thought about it.

Now, putting that together with Liu Jili's words, Liu Acheng suddenly understood-why had Brother Qi's father still been able to give him instructions before he left, yet insisted that only one member of the Qi family remained? Why had he insisted that Brother Qi marry? Why had they never seen Brother Qi's father along the road? And why had Brother Qi so quickly become captivated by the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice and its doctrine of mutual protection at the grassroots?

Of course it was because, when they fled, Grandpa Qi had stayed behind of his own accord in their old home in the Huai River region, where even the Green-Stubble Crops had already been cut, rather than burden his son.

It was precisely for reasons like this that the proportion of workers in their fleeing band had been far higher than normal. Only those with clans, neighbors, and families to support them had been able to bring the old, weak, women, and children south with them.

As for the consequences of insisting on taking the old, weak, women, and children along-to put it bluntly, without the Straw-Sandal Group formed later, all four members of Grandpa Wang's family would have perished on the road.

How ridiculous that, because he had joined the refugee band right from the start, he had been blind to what lay right under his own lamp and failed to notice this.

"I actually accounted for that," Liu Acheng said, coming back to himself and drinking the last mouthful of porridge in his bowl. His voice suddenly became much calmer. "Don't forget, by our earlier reckoning, quite a few of the workers who left should return when they have no other choice... Once that happens, workers will still make up more than half."

Although Liu Jili noticed the other man's brief lapse, he remained troubled by the immediate situation. "If that happens, we'll probably have more than a thousand people again."

"Were you expecting them to leave us exactly a thousand able-bodied men, no more and no less?" Liu Acheng had regained his usual tone. "If that really happened, we might as well launch a night raid on that fortified manor belonging to the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice and take it for ourselves."

"You think a thousand men could take that fortified manor?" Liu Jili was utterly speechless. "Let me tell you, never mind something as formidable as the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice-from Jiankang to the Wu Region, there isn't a single fortified manor a thousand men could touch. Which of them hasn't learned its lesson from the Wang Dun Rebellion and the Su Jun Rebellion? If you ask me, if we really wanted to rob people or seize a mountain and become bandit kings, we'd be better off going to Kuaiji. The estates there were all taken by famous gentlemen who crossed the river later. They have little in the way of defenses and plenty of wealth. If we really captured one, even three thousand people wouldn't need to worry about surviving winter."

After saying that, Liu Jili laughed himself, and Liu Acheng laughed too. Clearly, they both recognized their own tension and the helplessness of having truly been driven into a corner.

After eating, perhaps because they really were exhausted, the two returned together to the straw piles in their shelter before it was fully dark.

Darkness came quickly in winter. Before long, the entire camp sank into dusk. More than half its former campfires had abruptly vanished, and the elongated shadows of shelters and woodpiles made it far gloomier than usual. Worse still, the women and children who could see no future and had no idea what to do began crying again. Mingling with the faint night breeze of late autumn and early winter, their sobs soon spread through the whole camp.

Listening to those sounds and watching those indistinct shadows, Liu Acheng could not help feeling moved. Although he had taken on this responsibility to change his role and make a speculative investment, the trouble was that anything involving people became troublesome. People were not grass and trees, after all. Once a sense of responsibility and a conscience had truly taken root, when the time came that he had no choice but to let go, would he do something foolish?

At that thought, he began to believe the claim a little. Perhaps the Grand Commander really had been cried into a near-fatal illness by the military families below Beigu Mountain... Who said a cowardly imperial in-law could not also have some conscience and sense of responsibility?

Keeping one's judgments tucked beneath the skin, eh?

It was hardly Liu Acheng's fault that he kept letting his thoughts wander. The atmosphere in camp was simply like that, the long night was hard to endure, and there was no one to chat with him. After an unknown stretch of time, he finally detected something unusual-a large part of the crying near the valley entrance suddenly disappeared.

It did not gradually grow quieter. It dropped abruptly, in a distinct step, into silence.

Soon, as the disturbance moved farther inward, before it even reached the innermost circle, a campfire along the way broke into a small commotion, with even a few curses. Liu Acheng felt rather helpless.

Then, seemingly because they had already caused a disturbance, the newcomers stopped concealing their movements. They rushed past the campfires, heading straight for Liu Acheng's shelter. Judging by their movements, someone among them knew the camp's layout exceptionally well: fences, ditches, shelters, woodpiles, and campfires were all perfectly clear to him. He turned where he needed to turn and jumped where he needed to jump, allowing those behind to follow without a moment's hesitation.

Yet when they reached the great central campfire, their steps noticeably slowed. They hesitated at the entrance to the path leading to Liu Acheng's shelter, then began arguing and even shoving one another.

It seemed some of them had lost their nerve.

Under these circumstances, several bare-chested men even turned aside to warm themselves at the fire.

Now Liu Acheng, hidden behind a woodpile beside the campfire, truly could barely stand watching anymore. He nearly stepped out with his cocked military crossbow and positioned himself behind them... He genuinely feared that if this went on, these men-at least half bare-chested, most carrying wooden clubs, a few without even a decent stick, and perhaps only two or three with knives-would simply run away!

Thinking of how he had started laying his plans days earlier, deliberately exposing so many weaknesses only for blind men to see them... Most importantly, to lure these wretches in, he had not even assembled a camp management team in time. Tonight he had spent so long out here in the wind, listening to crying all evening. The thought left him helpless.

Fortunately, all their pushing and shoving finally produced a result. The men in front were clearly worried that delay would invite trouble. Gritting their teeth, they raised their knives and led the rush down the path.

But barely had they entered when firelight suddenly blazed within, followed by shouts. Someone bellowed, "Catch the thieves!"

Clearly, Liu Huzi and his men, who had secretly returned that evening to lie in ambush, had also grown impatient. They immediately lit their torches and attacked.

With the flare of firelight and the shouting, those outside could not see clearly what was happening within. But the thieves bringing up the rear showed no intention of charging in, or even helping their companions. Instead, they scattered in panic and fled back the way they had come. Yet as soon as they returned to the campfire, they saw that the bare-chested accomplices who had been warming themselves there were now squatting on the ground with their hands over their heads. Across the fire, a youth wearing a crimson headscarf, a green winter robe, and hemp sandals had somehow already seated himself on a log. He held a military crossbow leveled at the men turning back.

At least half of these first men to turn and flee knew who the youth was-he was precisely the person they had come to rob, supposedly the camp's new chief steward, Liu Acheng.

At this point, how could the thieves fail to realize they had walked into an ambush?

"Nobody move. Anyone who thinks his hide is thicker than a tiger's is welcome to try!" Liu Acheng said coldly. "By our own rules, come beside the fire, put your hands over your heads, and squat down!"

Now, those who had stayed at the rear and been first to turn and flee were the most cowardly to begin with. Faced with this situation, three or five immediately came over and squatted down. Watching them, even those behind who did not know how soon learned.

Before long, seven or eight were squatting there.

Soon, Liu Huzi and a dozen or so strong Liu Clan Relatives drove out the remaining dozen-odd men. Together with three or five wounded ones, they were all held under guard before the central campfire.

Only then did Liu Acheng put away his crossbow and listen to the sounds around him again. Sure enough, Liu Jili had followed the plan and begun calming the camp's inhabitants along the route from the valley entrance. Liu Acheng rose again and called up the people around the great campfire, sending those who could plainly see the situation to reassure everyone else. They were simply to say that all the thieves had been captured and people could sleep in peace... Anyone brave enough was welcome to come to the central campfire and watch how they were dealt with, but nobody was allowed to go to the valley entrance or wander about.

After making his rounds, Liu Acheng returned and saw Liu Huzi frowning. He began by criticizing himself. "My plan wasn't thorough enough. I should have left a few men here to help cover my rear. I nearly let them scatter and escape."

"Your plan wasn't thorough enough," Liu Huzi said, clearly displeased. "But not because you failed to post more men at the rear. You gave these people too much credit... All that baiting and ambushing-what use was it against the likes of them? Better to have listened to me and gone out to sweep them up from the start. We might even have picked up some grain and weapons. Acheng, you don't know this, but if you hadn't repeatedly told me to wait until they entered your shelter before acting, I was about to jump out and ask them-are you thieves? What kind of thieves are you? You reach the door and neither go in nor back away. Are you visiting relatives and feeling shy?"

Liu Acheng had no answer, because he had actually wanted to ask the same thing just now-never mind anything else, even if they were not going to rob him, shouldn't those bare-chested men have gone in to seize their clothes back?

Had winter not reached the lands south of the river yet, leaving it too warm, or had I failed to get the information across properly?

But this was not the time to complain about the thieves' lack of professionalism. After a while, seeing that quite a few spectators had gathered and Liu Jili had also arrived, confirming that no woodpiles had been set alight and there was no unrest in camp, Liu Acheng cleared his throat. He walked over with his head held high, sat on the log again, and called out his demand:

"Who is the ringleader? Stand up and speak!"

Now, although these thieves were all products of the deterioration in public order as this year's refugees lost hope of surviving winter, they were clearly divided into two bands. One wore short coarse-cloth tunics: outsiders who had wandered into the area a dozen or so days earlier and reportedly carried out several robberies. The other consisted mostly of bare-chested men without such tunics, products of the crackdown Liu Acheng had specifically asked Liu Huzi to conduct so he could smoothly take over the camp.

At the question, the thieves all stirred. Those in tunics glanced at one another, visibly hesitant, but the bare-chested men were much more direct. Very soon, at least four or five pointed together at one large, bare-chested man.

The man was plainly stunned. He rose in disbelief, trembling beside the fire as he pointed at himself, his face full of confusion and panic. "Acheng, you know me, don't you? I only did what you told me-gathered them together, brought that other band over, and told them you had money and clothes here. How did I become the leader?"

Liu Acheng and Liu Jili were stunned too, because this was precisely the trusted man they had sent out to pass along information and draw in the thieves. Indeed, he had been the first to approach Liu Acheng and offer to follow him back when there were only rumors—Liu Yehu, who had stripped himself stark naked when they were robbed on the Huai River. Though of the Liu Surname, he was merely a destitute fellow.

But everyone usually just called him Liu Dage.

"Dage!" Liu Huzi, who had not participated in this plan, actually reacted a moment sooner and could not help laughing aloud. "Among thieves like these, you passed along information, gathered the men, acted as go-between for both sides, and clearly led the way just now. If you aren't the ringleader, who is?"

Liu Acheng recovered quickly and waved a hand. "What bandit's viciousness isn't cultivated through repeated murder and arson? Are we supposed to stop treating them as thieves just because they're clumsy now? I say Dage did an excellent job. Those outside thieves are what matter. Which one is their ringleader? Dage, point him out!"

Liu Dage was clearly still flustered. He hurriedly pointed at a man on the ground. "That's Wang Longneck, the leader of that band. He came from the Pei Kingdom."

Everyone looked over and immediately understood why he had not stood up earlier. The fellow was covered in blood, his neck drawn in and his hands clutching his belly as he groaned... On closer inspection, someone had clearly slashed him in the abdomen earlier.

That saved some trouble.

It really did save trouble... Under the original plan, Liu Acheng had intended to kill someone to establish his authority, making it easier to gather these destitute men into a basic force of fighters and workers. But after recalling Brother Qi's father at supper and then seeing the thieves' clumsiness for himself, he had begun to feel some compassion. Since he had entrapped them himself, he thought, there was no absolute need to kill anyone.

Now, however, this fellow was already wounded. Even if they did not kill him, he probably would not survive winter.

Still, with matters having reached this point, there was no need to reveal those thoughts.

"Kill him!" Having reached that conclusion, Liu Acheng kept it brief, then looked at Liu Jili and Liu Huzi... It was not that he insisted on ordering those two to kill someone, but that he could not bear to expend a crossbow bolt.

Liu Huzi understood and was about to step forward with his knife, but Liu Jili moved first. Raising the long spear in his hand, he thrust straight at the man's retracted neck. His first thrust went wide, and the young bandit called Wang Longneck let out a piercing scream, frightening many children in the nearby shelters into tears.

Fortunately, the long spear was clearly a military weapon. After three or five successive thrusts, Liu Jili finally killed him.

"Then what? What do we do now?" Putting away his spear, Liu Jili gestured with his chin at the thieves trembling on the ground and pressed the question.

His meaning was obvious. Given how these men had behaved, did they really need to go through the remaining steps of the plan to bring them into the fold? They could simply hand out clothes and assign them work.

Unexpectedly, Liu Acheng really did give a surprising answer. "First hand out clothes and assign them to groups. But since we've killed someone, shouldn't we report it to the authorities?"

----------I am the restarted dividing line----------

Once, the people of Pengcheng were scattered in Jingkou. Winter came, the authorities offered no relief, and the Liu Clan all departed. Yehu knew Emperor Taizu cared for the orphaned and widowed and would surely stay, so he came by night to ask leave to follow him.

Emperor Taizu marveled and said, "The other day I gave you a bolt of cloth, enough to see you through winter. Why follow me and suffer the cold?"

He replied, "Half the bolt became the clothes on my back, and half paid the widow in the neighboring shelter. I have nothing left, so following you is precisely what I should do."

He asked again, "Do you not think of the widow in the neighboring shelter?"

He replied again, "The widow received half a bolt from me and found another half from someone else. She has joined the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice and has no worries for winter."

Emperor Taizu laughed and allowed him to follow.

-New Account of Tales of the World, "Bold and unrestrained," XIII