The Warring States, Books 1-3

by Greg Strandberg

  “I was just having some fun with him,” Wen laughed.

  The others continued to laugh, all but Liu and Wei. Both apprentice and master looked at one another, and although both smiled, each man’s mind was churning with thoughts, both seriously doubting that Wen had merely been having fun with Kang.”

  EIGHTEEN

  In the week that passed before the rulers of the other three States arrived, the men from Wei, Han, and Zhao tried to keep themselves as occupied as possible. It wasn’t an easy thing to do. Although the palace grounds were spacious, by the end of the first full day most of the eighteen men had walked their entirety once or twice over. Some ventured out into the city, something that became more and more common as the days spent waiting increased, although Luoyang, despite being the capital of the Seven States, was not a very interesting city. Most of the men soon grew bored with the same well laid-out streets and quickly took to passing their time within the palace grounds once again. Confounding matters and leading to the increasing boredom was the segregation of the three groups into their own quarters. After that first night’s dinner the men of each state rarely dined together and spent little of their time with one another. While that first night had been cordial, something about Kang’s sudden departure into the night had caused each group to be wary of the others. Kang himself hadn’t been seen since that night, nor had the king. It became increasingly obvious to all that the arrival of the other three States would be welcomed and then they’d all happily return from whence they’d come.

  For some the palace routine was stifling in its regularity, for others it was a welcome relief from the vagaries of previous schedules. Liu Kui and Wei Yang were two that welcomed that routine, and, as they did each morning and afternoon, they walked along the many small canals that ran through the palace grounds.

  “It’s been almost a week now,” Wei said as they stopped atop one of the small arched bridges and stared down at the many Poi fish swimming in the water below, “and still we wait.”

  “Waiting is a part of life,” Liu replied. “It’s what we do during those times that can define us and make us stronger for the brief periods when we act.”

  “What kind of deals do you think will be made once the other states arrive?” Wei asked, turning to look at Liu.

  Liu turned and began walking along the bridge once again. “That’s difficult to say with any certainty, Wei. I’m confident that a peace agreement will be made between all the states at King Weilie’s behest, but as to what backroom deals each of the states will then make with each other, well, that’s anyone’s guess.”

  “You’ve not discussed the matter with Marquis Wen?”

  Liu shook his head. “Wen has been seeking counsel from no one, not Zhai, Wu, or I. He spends most of his days sitting in the gardens of the palace sipping tea and looking at the birds.”

  Wei furrowed his brows as he looked up at Liu. “Is he well?”

  “Oh yes,” Liu said with a chuckle. “Quite well, if you discount the obvious boredom that we all feel.”

  They walked on in silence for a few more minutes. On either side of them large willows stood, throwing their long branches down past the men’s heads. The only sounds were the chirping of the birds and the faint splashes of water from the fish in the canals.

  “Of all of the Seven States, which do you think should be of the most concern to Wei?” Wei asked after they’d come to another bridge and stopped to look down.

  Liu stared down into the water for several minutes before speaking. “That is a difficult question to answer. Each state can be dangerous to the welfare of Wei for a variety of reasons.”

  “Is it Qi?” Wei asked.

  Liu shook his head. “Not at this time, I don’t think.”

  “But in the future they will be.”

  Liu nodded. “Most likely House Tian will finally overthrow House Jiang and take over the state. When that happens there’s a very good chance the heirs of Tai Tian will come looking for vengeance.”

  “You don’t think House Jiang will finish them off like Duke Kang insists he will?”

  “House Jiang hasn’t been able to do that for more than a hundred years,” Liu said, shaking his head. “I see no reason why they suddenly can now.”

  Wei nodded this time and then stared back down into the water.

  “Chu concerns me,” Liu said after another minute had passed, drawing a look from Wei.

  “Because of their size,” Wei said more than asked.

  Liu tilted his head to the side. “That’s one reason, yes, but there are many.”

  Wei waited for a few moments, but when it was obvious Liu wouldn’t expound he went ahead and ventured his own opinions.

  “Chu has always been an expansionist and militaristic state, and a very successful one at that,” Wei said. “That is, however, until their bureaucracy became too bloated for them to continue along on such a course.”

  “Explain,” Liu said as he turned from the bridge railing and began walking slowly along the path once again.

  Wei fell in beside him, his eyes on the paving stones at their feet but his mind flipping through the scrolls of history and geography that he’d studied in Anyi.

  “Throughout its long history Chu has always coerced and then absorbed its allies,” Wei began, thinking it best to start at the beginning, which Liu always encouraged him to do. “This strategy worked well for them, and Chu prospered. About two hundred years ago, however, Chu’s power was checked by the rising power of Jin and its allies to the north. One of these allies, the State of Wu, grew very powerful and even managed to invade both Qin and Chu, the latter invasion creating so much chaos and disorder Chu was forced to move their capital further to the northwest to escape the threat. In order to check the growing power of this upstart state, which hadn’t even been considered a threat just a hundred years earlier but which now was moving from being one of the smaller states to one of the larger, Chu supported the rise of Yue. This state, to the east on the other side of Wu from Chu, then grew in power, culminating in its defeat of Wu after Wu had captured its king, released him, and then suffered the retaliatory attack.”

  “Very well,” Liu said, “but you still don’t have all of the names memorized.”

  Wei nodded. “It’s difficult to remember all the rulers of the smaller states.”

  “Of course it is, but that’s what separates us from the common peasants and attracts the attention of capable rulers who require the names of previous rulers from time to time.”

  “Now tell me,” Liu continued, “what changes did these effects have on Chu, creating the state that it is today?”

  “Chu had previously had its expansion checked by Jin two hundred years before, and then by Wu nearly a hundred years after that. To end the latter threat they supported Yue, which over the past one hundred years has become so strong that now Chu is in turn checked by them. This situation of going from a state always expanding to one that’s been forced to adhere to its now nearly two-hundred year-old borders is one both stifling and harmful to it.”

  Liu nodded. “Go on.”

  “For some reason the people of Chu always have to be expanding, and since they can’t do so with their borders they do so with their bureaucracy. After two centuries of such expansion the state’s become so large and wasteful that it can’t do much of anything. The Chu government has become very corrupt and inefficient, with much of their treasury going to pay the increasing number of bureaucrats. There are now so many of these officials that the only function of most of them, as far as I can tell, is simply to take money. And Chu’s large army, perhaps most painful to this once-proud and militaristic state, has now become of such low quality due to the corrupt and cumbersome bureaucracy that it is questionable whether it could even defend its own borders, let alone expand them.”

  “So what will Duke Dao of Chu seek when he reaches Luoyang?” Liu asked.

  “Peace, most likely, and perhaps even peace with the smaller states.”


  “And will he get it?”

  “Between the Seven States, yes. But peace with the smaller states?” Wei shook his head. “The others will never go along with that. You heard the talk around the table a week ago. The Seven States need to fight against the smaller states so they won’t fight against themselves. If Chu is too inefficient to even do that, then perhaps it has no right being one of the Seven States any longer.”

  Liu nodded, pleased with his apprentice’s words. Wei had come a long way since he’d begun studying under Liu those many years ago. He’d had started as the son of humble peasants, neither of which had been able to read or write, but who wanted more for their son than the same life of backbreaking labor in the fields that they’d had. So they’d started their son off on an education early, first by having him scratch rudimentary words into the dirt floor of their hut with a stick, words they themselves had painstakingly copied from signs and notices on their infrequent trips to the larger towns to sell their produce, and which they themselves couldn’t read.

  Wei had shown an early aptitude for this rudimentary learning, and the boy was soon recognizing words when he was old enough to join his parents on their twice-yearly trips into the city. On one of these, when the boy was not much older than six or seven, his mother and father had left him with a distant relative or perhaps friend of the family, Wei was not sure, and the boy’s education began for real. His life in the city was very different from the countryside, and the love he’d received from his parents, as well as his carefree days, quickly became a thing of the past. In the city he was expected to work, and he did so from before dawn to well-after dark selling the family’s produce in the market. It was boring and not much work for a young child, but Wei had remembered his parents parting words to him about his studies. They’d encouraged him, pleaded with him actually, Wei remembered many years later, to keep reading and writing. Wei did so, and soon his vocabulary of written words had soared to more than a thousand, even if he did not know what all of them meant.

  Wei quickly became the notice of the marketplace for his ability to scratch nearly any word he saw into the dust, and it wasn’t long before he was sought out to copy letters and contracts for important men who couldn’t write themselves. It didn’t take long after that for well-educated scholars to take notice either, and after a few years in the marketplace Wei was sent to a boarding school where his studies began in earnest. He was forced to spend the first few years catching up, often attending classes with boys nearly half his age, but after only two years he was one of the top students in the school. By the time he was old enough to take the official State Examinations he’d already come to the attention of high-ranking government officials who were eager to put his talents to use for the state. When he successfully passed the exams, scoring higher than any other applicant that year, he was immediately put into government service, serving first in the city of Ye where he’d lived for so many years. His service was of such quality, however, that he was quickly sent off to work in the capital. It was in Anyi that he came to the attention of Liu, who quickly recognized an aspect of himself in the young man, and took him on as his apprentice. That had been ten years before, and not a day had gone by that Liu regretted it.

  Liu continued to gaze at Wei out of the corner of his eye as they approached yet another bridge. Now in his mid-thirties, Wei still had many years ahead of him. Liu knew he himself didn’t have much more government service in him; he was just getting too old. His whole life he’d faithfully served Marquis Wen of Wei, and he’d been rewarded for that service handsomely, his family well-housed in a spacious home within the capital, his own daughter already married-off to a respected merchant family while his son was busily preparing for the State Examinations, eager to follow in his influential father’s footsteps. Still, as Liu looked over at Wei, he realized that the younger man beside him was more like a son than even his own. Liu’s unfailing service to Wen and the State of Wei had kept him away from his family more than it’d kept them together. While it was true that Wen’s increased age had kept him within the capital more often in previous years, the first several decades of Wen’s reign had barely taken place in Anyi, so intent was the marquis on conquering smaller states and expanding his realm. Even when Liu had found enough time to somehow fall in love and marry he’d seen little of his wife and that strain had threatened to end his marriage more than once. When children came Liu was ready to take a lower position so that he could spend more time with them, but Wen had talked him out of it. Of the first decade of his children’s lives, Liu figured that he’d spent a total of three or four years in their company.

  Liu shook his head at the thought and Wei saw him.

  “Is something wrong?” Wei asked, puzzled at the melancholy look on his master’s face.

  Liu looked up at Wei and shook his head again. “No, nothing. I was just thinking of the past is all.”

  Wei nodded and they walked on. Their longest lapse in the conversation so far occurred, with neither man speaking for quite some time. They just walked, enjoyed the sights of the gardens, and listened to the sounds around them. Both men, having dedicated their lives to learning and scholarship, were quite at home with their own thoughts and neither needed conversation, but the student-teacher relationship they had eventually came back to the fore and Liu broke the silence.

  “We’ve discussed Chu and it’s possible desires, but what of the other two states?”

  “Yan’s main concerns will be in regard to Zhao and Qi,” Wei answered without pause, “but they have larger problems to their north.”

  “Indeed,” Liu said. “The barbarians.”

  Wei nodded. “Called Mountain Barbarians for several generations to differentiate them from the menace that plagued Jin, the tribes that now invade Yan every few years are called the Donghu.”

  “The Eastern Barbarians,” Liu said.

  “Correct. While in the past they’ve only been able to gather a hundred or so men under any one chieftain, in recent years their numbers have grown larger and it seems that stronger leaders are able to gather more men to them. As a result the raids south into Yan have grown worse, although still containable.”

  “But for how long?” Liu asked. “At some point those barbarians will grow organized enough to launch a serious attack, one that could cripple Yan.”

  “And that is what worries Yan more than either Zhao to its west or Qi to its south,” Wei said. “Those threats, from neighbors it can reason with, are nothing compared to the mindless rabble that lie to its north. It’s probably for that reason that Yan has the most extensive walls of any of the Seven States, even more so than Zhao.”

  “Nearly all of the Seven States have walls, though, and even many of the smaller states,” Liu said. “What makes Yan different?”

  “Yan has begun constructing the walls to their north to be higher and stronger. While many of the states, Wei included, have walls, they’re rudimentary at best and only capable of stopping small arms attacks from swords and spears.”

  “Which many of the barbarians don’t even have,” Liu pointed out.

  “Yes, not yet, but they will,” Wei said, and Liu nodded, conceding the point. “The stamped earth and gravel walls, often held together with simple wooden boards, and rising no more than half-a-man’s height in most locations, are adequate at hindering most attacks, but not stopping them completely. The best that can be hoped for with such fortifications is for the attackers to be funneled into a small opening where they can be slaughtered en mass.”

  “And Yan is doing something differently in regard to its barbarian threat?”

  Wei nodded. “They’re beginning to use more stone and less earth, and they’re building higher. Their walls, right now stretching for many miles along the most penetrable areas of their northern border, are already several meters high with watchtowers erected at even intervals. I’ve already heard of one barbarian raid that was stopped with nothing more than arrows fired from above, the
onrushing tide getting no closer than a hundred yards before turning back in retreat, not a single defender lost.”

  “That is impressive,” Liu said, “but if that’s the case, why would they continue to be concerned more about barbarians than about their more wily neighbors?”

  “Yan’s border with Qi to the south has always been small in comparison to the border with Zhao in the west, but both are miniscule in comparison to their northern border,” Wei explained. “Yan, depending on how you want to look at it, is either blessed or cursed with its horizontal shape. This keeps its engagements with the other states to a minimum while most of its time is wrapped up with the barbarians. The wars that have broken out between Zhao, and Jin before it, have all taken place in the mountainous border region between the two States, and each conflict has ended in stalemate until another state has interceded, which hasn’t occurred often over the past six hundred years.”

  “So the State that is willing to help Yan defend its northern border can then count on their support in the future,” Liu said.

  “Support, yes, but little beyond mere words,” Wei answered. “There’s no way that Yan can send troops away from its volatile northern border.”

  “So they’re useless to anyone as a friend, and even more so as a potential conquest.”

  “Why would anyone want to burden themselves with that northern border?” Wei asked.

  Liu nodded. “So that leaves us with Qin.”

  “The weakest of the Seven States,” Wei said scornfully.

  “You don’t like them,” Liu said, turning to his apprentice.

  “It’s not that I don’t like them,” Wei said, “it’s just that I can’t understand why they’ve been allowed to remain one of the Seven for so long.”

  “They have a long history, a history in which they’ve proven their place as an equal to the other six,” Liu said.