李陵 English

I

In the ninth month, in autumn, of the second year of Tianhan under Emperor Wu of Han, Li Ling, Commandant of Cavalry, led five thousand foot soldiers north from the frontier fort of Zhelu.

For thirty days they marched north, threading through the stony, barren hill country where the southeastern spur of the Altai range sinks away into the Gobi desert.

The north wind blew cold through their war coats, and the feeling that this was a lone army come ten thousand li from home lay heavy upon them.

At last, at the foot of Mount Junji in the northern desert, the army made camp.

They had already penetrated deep into the domain of the enemy Xiongnu.

Autumn though it was, this being northern country, the alfalfa had already withered, and the leaves of elm and tamarisk had long since fallen.

Leaves aside, even trees themselves (save near the camp) were scarcely to be found — nothing but sand and rock and gravel bars, and the desolate scene of dry riverbeds without water.

As far as the eye could reach, no trace of human smoke was to be seen; the rare visitor to this waste was no more than an antelope in search of water.

Yet even at the sight of wild geese hurrying south high above the far mountains that jutted sharp against the autumn sky, not one among officers or men was stirred to any sweet pang of homesickness.

So perilous, to that degree, was their position.

To advance deep into enemy territory against the Xiongnu, whose main strength lay in cavalry, with not a single troop of horsemen along — foot soldiers only, for those mounted were no more than Ling himself and a handful of his staff officers — was, from the very outset, nothing short of the height of recklessness.

And those foot soldiers numbered a mere five thousand, with no support whatsoever to be had; moreover this Mount Junji lay a full fifteen hundred li — by Chinese reckoning — even from Juyan, the nearest Han frontier fort.

It was a march that could never have been sustained without the men's absolute trust in and devotion to their commander, Li Ling.

Every year, without fail, as soon as the autumn wind began to rise, great bands of fierce invaders would appear along the northern border of Han, spurring their barbarian horses.

Frontier officials were slain, the people plundered, and livestock carried off.

Wuyuan, Shuofang, Yunzhong, Shanggu, Yanmen — these were the districts that suffered year after year.

Save for those few years from the Yuanshou era into the Yuanding era, when the martial genius of Grand General Wei Qing and Swift Cavalry General Huo Qubing had for a time driven the khan's court from the lands south of the desert, this northern scourge had continued without interruption for these thirty years past.

Eighteen years had passed since Huo Qubing's death, and seven since Wei Qing had died.

Zhao Ponu, Marquis of Zhuoye, surrendered his entire army to the enemy, and the forts Grand Herald Xu Ziwei had built in the northern desert were destroyed almost as soon as raised.

Of generals worthy enough to command the trust of the whole army, there remained only Li Guangli, the Ershi General, who had won his martial name a few years before on the expedition against Dayuan.

That year — in the fifth month, the summer of the second year of Tianhan — ahead of the Xiongnu's invasion, the Ershi General set out from Jiuquan at the head of thirty thousand horse.

His aim was to strike, at the Tian Shan, the Xiongnu's Worthy King of the Right, who had long been probing at the western border.

Emperor Wu ordered Li Ling to take charge of the baggage train for this campaign.

Summoned before the emperor at the Wutai Hall of the Weiyang Palace, Li Ling, however, pleaded with all his might to be excused from that duty.

Ling was the grandson of the famed general Li Guang, known as the Flying General.

Long said to carry his grandfather's very manner, he was a master of mounted archery, and for several years past, as Commandant of Cavalry, he had been stationed at Jiuquan and Zhangye on the western frontier, teaching archery and drilling troops.

At an age now drawing near forty, in the very fullness of his vigor, the post of baggage officer must have seemed to him altogether too wretched a thing.

To Ling's petition — that the troops he had trained on the frontier were all men of Jing and Chu, warriors each worth a thousand, and that he begged leave to lead them out to strike, harrying the Xiongnu army from the flank — Emperor Wu found himself nodding in assent.

But because troops had already been dispatched, one force after another, to so many quarters, there was unfortunately no surplus of cavalry horses left to spare for Ling's army.

Li Ling said that even so, it made no difference to him.

It did indeed seem an unreasonable thing to attempt, but rather than be assigned to the baggage train, he wished far more to brave the danger together with the five thousand men under him who would spare neither body nor life for his sake.

At Ling's words — that he wished, with the few, to strike at the many — the emperor, who loved a bold display, was greatly pleased, and granted his request.

Li Ling returned west to Zhangye, mustered the troops under him, and set out at once northward.

Lu Bode, Commandant of the Crossbowmen, then garrisoned at Juyan, received an edict and rode out partway to meet Ling's army.

So far, well and good — but from that point matters took an exceedingly unfortunate turn.

This Lu Bode was, in fact, a veteran general who had long served under Huo Qubing, had been enfeoffed as Marquis of Pili, and who, twelve years before in particular, had led a hundred thousand troops as General Who Calms the Waves to destroy Nanyue.

Since then, having run afoul of the law and lost his marquisate, he had been reduced to his present post, guarding the western border.

In age alone, the gap between him and Li Ling was near enough that of father and son.

That this old general, who had once won a marquisate of his own, should now be made to eat the dust behind a mere youth like Li Ling — this, whatever way one looked at it, he found intolerable.

The moment he met Ling's army, he sent a messenger to the capital to submit a memorial.

Just now, in autumn, the Xiongnu's horses were at their fattest, and a small force could hardly hope to withstand the keen edge of an enemy whose forte was cavalry warfare.

It would therefore be the wiser course, the memorial argued, to winter here together with Li Ling and wait for spring before launching an assault with five thousand horsemen each from Jiuquan and Zhangye.

Of this, naturally, Li Ling knew nothing.

When Emperor Wu read it, he flew into a rage.

He took it for a petition drawn up in collusion between Li Ling and Bode.

What was the meaning of this — that after making such bold boasts in his presence, the man should now, once out at the frontier, suddenly turn faint of heart?

At once messengers sped from the capital to Bode and to Ling.

Since Li Ling had boasted before the emperor that he would strike the many with the few, there was no need for Bode to join forces with him.

Now that the Xiongnu had invaded Xihe, he was to leave Ling at once and ride to Xihe to block the enemy's path — such was the edict sent to Bode.

The edict to Li Ling ordered him to press on at once into the northern desert, to reconnoiter and observe the region from Mount Junji in the east to the banks of the Longle River in the south, and, if nothing untoward appeared, to follow the old road once taken by the Marquis of Zhuoye to Shouxiang Fortress and there rest his men.

Needless to say, there followed a fierce interrogation: what, in heaven's name, was the meaning of that memorial drawn up in league with Bode?

Setting aside the danger of roaming enemy territory with so small a force, this prescribed march of several thousand li was, for an army without horses, an exceedingly difficult undertaking in itself.

This was plain to anyone who considered the pace of an army marching on foot alone, the strength of men hauling wagons by hand, and the climate of barbarian country as it turned toward winter.

Emperor Wu was by no means a mediocre ruler, but he shared certain strengths and weaknesses in common with other rulers who were likewise no mediocrities — Emperor Yang of Sui, the First Emperor of Qin.

Even the Ershi General, brother of the peerlessly favored Lady Li, had once, for lack of troops, sought to withdraw from Dayuan, only to touch the emperor's wrath and find the Jade Gate Pass shut against him.

That very expedition against Dayuan had, after all, been undertaken for no greater cause than a wish for fine horses.

Once the emperor had spoken, however willful the demand, it had, without exception, to be carried out.

And in Li Ling's case, all the more so, since the role itself was one he had begged for in the first place.

(There was only the considerable strain of season and distance to contend with) — there was no reason whatsoever for hesitation.

He had, in this way, set out on "a northern campaign without cavalry"

as it might be called.

They remained more than ten days among the hills of Mount Junji.

During that time, scouts were sent out far afield every day to probe the enemy's movements, and, besides this, the terrain of the surrounding mountains and rivers had to be mapped in full detail and reported to the capital.

The report was carried on the person of a man under Ling's command named Chen Buluo, who rode alone for the capital.

The chosen messenger, after bowing once to Li Ling, mounted one of the fewer than ten horses they had, gave it a single lash of the whip, and galloped down the hill.

Officers and men of the whole army watched, with a certain forlorn feeling, as his figure grew smaller and smaller amid the gray, parched, boundless landscape.

For ten days, not a single Xiongnu soldier was seen within thirty li east or west of Mount Junji.

The Ershi General, who had marched out to the Tian Shan during the summer ahead of them, had once broken the Worthy King of the Right, only to be surrounded on his way back by another great Xiongnu force and suffer a crushing defeat.

Six or seven of every ten Han soldiers were said to have been cut down, and the general's own life was said to have hung by a thread.

That rumor had reached their ears as well.

Where, now, was the main force of that enemy who had broken Li Guangli?

The enemy force that Yinyu General Gongsun Ao was now said to be holding off around Xihe and Shuofang — to whose aid Lu Bode, having parted ways with Ling, had ridden — did not, when one reckoned the distance and the time involved, seem likely to be the main body of the enemy in question.

For there was no way they could have traveled so quickly from the Tian Shan all the way to the land of Henan — the Ordos — four thousand li to the east.

By any reckoning, the main strength of the Xiongnu had to be encamped somewhere between Ling's camp and the Zhiju River to the north.

Li Ling himself climbed daily to the crest of the hill before the camp to survey all four directions, but to the east and south there lay nothing save an unbroken expanse of flat sand stretching into the distance, while to the west and north ranged only tree-sparse, hilly mountains one after another; though now and again, among the autumn clouds, the shadow of some bird that might have been a hawk or a falcon could be glimpsed, not a single Xiongnu horseman was ever to be seen upon the ground.

Their camp stood at the edge of a sparse wood in a mountain gorge, war-carts drawn up in a ring around it, tents pitched close together within.

When night fell, the temperature dropped sharply.

The soldiers broke off what little wood they could find and burned it for warmth.

Before ten days were out, the moon had waned away.

Perhaps because the air was so dry, the stars were strikingly beautiful.

Night after night, grazing the jet-black silhouette of the mountains, the Wolf Star blazed, trailing a pale blue-white beam of light at a slant.

It was after more than ten uneventful days had passed, on the night they had at last decided that the morrow would see them break camp and take the prescribed route southeast.

A sentry, gazing idly up at the blazing Wolf Star, saw all at once a remarkably large, reddish-yellow star appear directly beneath it.

Even as he wondered at it, that unfamiliar, enormous star trailed a thick red tail and moved.

And then, one after another — two, three, four, five — similar lights appeared around it, and moved.

Just as the sentry was about to cry out involuntarily, those distant lights vanished all at once, in an instant.

As though what he had just seen had been nothing but a dream.

On receiving the sentry's report, Li Ling ordered the whole army to make ready so that, at first light the next morning, they could go straight into battle.

After going out to inspect each post, he returned once more to his tent and fell into a deep sleep, snoring like thunder.

When Li Ling woke the next morning and stepped outside, he found that the whole army had already taken up the formation ordered the night before, and was waiting quietly for the enemy.

Every man had gone out beyond the ring of drawn-up war-carts; those bearing halberd and shield stood in the front rank, those with bow and crossbow in the rank behind.

The two mountains flanking this valley still lay hushed in the darkness before dawn, yet here and there, in the shadow of the crags, one somehow sensed the presence of something lying in wait.

The moment the light of the rising sun came slanting into the valley — for the Xiongnu, it seemed, would never begin an action until the Chanyu himself had first paid homage to the morning sun —

countless human figures sprang up all at once along the ridges and slopes of both mountains, where until then not a single one had been visible.

With a war-cry that shook heaven and earth, the Xiongnu soldiers came pouring down the mountainside.

When the foremost of the Xiongnu had closed to within twenty paces, the drums of the Han camp, silent until that moment, sounded at last.

In an instant a thousand crossbows loosed as one, and at the twang of their strings several hundred Xiongnu soldiers fell together.

Without a moment's pause, the halberd-bearers of the Han front rank fell upon the remaining Xiongnu, who had already begun to waver.

The Xiongnu force broke completely, fleeing back up the mountain.

The Han army pursued and took several thousand enemy heads.

It was a brilliant victory, but so tenacious an enemy would never withdraw and leave it at that.

Today's enemy force alone must have numbered a good thirty thousand.

And from the banners that had fluttered on the mountaintop, this was unmistakably the Chanyu's own imperial guard.

If the Chanyu himself was present, then reinforcements of eighty or a hundred thousand men were bound to be sent in, and this had to be reckoned with.

Li Ling resolved to withdraw from this place at once and move south.

He changed, moreover, the plan he had held until the day before of making for Shouxiang Fortress two thousand li to the southeast, and instead took the same road south by which they had come half a month earlier, intending to reach the Juyan frontier fort (distant though it still was, well over a thousand li) as soon as possible.

At midday on the third day of their southward march, far to the north behind the Han army, a cloud-like haze of yellow dust was seen rising on the horizon.

It was the Xiongnu cavalry, in pursuit.

By the following day, eighty thousand Xiongnu horsemen, using the swiftness of their mounts, had already encircled the Han army on every side, front, rear, and flank, without a single gap.

This time, however, chastened it seemed by the previous day's failure, they did not close to point-blank range.

They ringed the southward-marching Han army at a distance, shooting long-range arrows from horseback.

Whenever Li Ling halted the whole army and had them take up a battle formation, the enemy spurred their horses far back, avoiding close combat.

When the march resumed, they would again draw near and loose their arrows.

Their pace of advance was, of course, drastically reduced, and their dead and wounded increased steadily, day by day.

Like wolves of the wilderness trailing a starved and exhausted traveler, the Xiongnu soldiers kept up this tactic, pursuing with dogged persistence.

Having worn their prey down little by little, they were watching for the moment to deliver, at last, the final blow.

Fighting as they went and retreating as they went, they continued south for several more days, until at last, in a certain mountain valley, the Han army took a day's rest.

The wounded already numbered a considerable many.

Li Ling called the roll of the entire force, and, having examined the extent of their losses, decided that those with only a single wound should still bear arms and fight as usual, that those who had suffered two wounds should still help push the war-carts, and that only those with three wounds should be placed upon litters and carried.

For want of transport, the dead could only be left behind, abandoned, in the wilderness.

That night, while making his rounds of the camp, Li Ling happened to discover a woman dressed in men's clothing inside one of the baggage carts.

On having every wagon in the army searched one by one, more than a dozen women were found hidden in the same way.

Years before, when the bandit gangs of the eastern passes had all been put to death at once, their wives and children had been driven out and forced to resettle on the western frontier.

Not a few of these widows, reduced to desperate want of food and clothing, had become wives to the frontier garrison soldiers, or had sunk to becoming prostitutes who took those same soldiers as their trade.

It was women of this sort who had hidden themselves in the war-carts and followed the army all the way into the northern desert.

Li Ling curtly ordered his officers to put the women to the sword.

Of the soldiers who had brought them along, not a word was said.

The women were dragged out to a hollow between the ravines, and for a while their shrill wailing continued; then, all at once, as though swallowed by the silence of the night, it fell away — and the officers and men within the tents listened to it in solemn stillness.

The next morning, meeting an enemy who, for the first time in many days, closed in for a direct assault, the whole Han army fought with a will and fought brilliantly.

More than three thousand enemy dead were left on the field.

Morale, long chafed and worn down by day after day of the enemy's relentless hit-and-run tactics, seemed suddenly to revive.

From the next day, the retreat southward began again, along the same road toward Longcheng as before.

The Xiongnu, for their part, reverted once more to their old tactic of encircling at a distance.

On the fifth day, the Han army came upon one of those marshy patches sometimes found amid the flat sands, and pressed into it.

The water was half frozen, the mud deep enough to swallow a man's shins, and however far they went, an endless field of withered reeds stretched on and on.

A band of Xiongnu circled to windward and set the reeds ablaze.

The north wind fanned the flames, and the fire, its glow gone pale and washed-out beneath the noonday sky, bore down on the Han army with terrifying speed.

Li Ling at once had the nearby reeds set with a backfire, and by this narrow measure managed to hold it off.

The fire was checked, but the difficulty of hauling the carts through such swampy ground defied description.

With no place to rest, they trudged the whole night through the mire, and the moment they finally reached higher ground the next morning, they were struck by the main enemy force, which had circled ahead and lain in wait for them.

It was a close-quarters melee, men and horses thrown together in confusion.

To avoid the cavalry's fierce charges, Li Ling abandoned the carts and shifted the field of battle into a sparse wood at the mountain's foot.

Their fierce volleys of arrows from among the trees proved highly effective.

When, by chance, the Chanyu himself appeared at the head of his troops together with his imperial guard, and a volley of repeating crossbows was let loose against them all at once, the Chanyu's white horse reared high on its forelegs, and the barbarian ruler, clad in a blue robe, was thrown to the ground in an instant.

Two of the guardsmen, without even dismounting, swept in from either side and scooped the Chanyu up between them, and the whole troop at once closed around him and withdrew swiftly.

After several hours of chaotic fighting, they at last managed to beat back the tenacious enemy, but it was, without question, the hardest battle they had yet fought.

The enemy dead left behind again numbered in the thousands, but the Han army too suffered nearly a thousand killed.

From the mouth of a Xiongnu captive taken that day, they were able to learn something of the enemy's circumstances.

According to him, the Chanyu, astonished at the toughness of the Han soldiers, seemed to suspect that their apparent fearlessness — advancing south day after day, unafraid even of a force twenty times their own, as though drawing the Xiongnu on — might mean they were relying on some ambush concealed nearby.

The night before, when the Chanyu had voiced this suspicion to his chief generals and put the matter to counsel, the war party had in the end carried the day, arguing that such a suspicion might well be justified, but that it would be a disgrace to them all if the Chanyu, leading tens of thousands of horsemen in person, could not destroy so small a Han force; it was decided that they would press the attack with all their strength through the forty or fifty li of mountain valleys that lay to the south, and only if they still failed to break the Han even after fighting one more battle on the open plain would they at last turn the army back to the north.

Hearing this, a faint hope — that they might, after all, somehow survive — stirred in the minds of the Han officers, from the colonel Han Yannian on down.

From the next day, the Xiongnu attacks grew ferocious in the extreme.

This was, no doubt, the beginning of that final all-out assault the prisoner had spoken of.

The attacks were repeated more than ten times in a single day.

Delivering fierce counterattacks all the while, the Han army moved gradually southward.

After three days they came out onto open plain.

Once battle was joined on open ground, where the power of cavalry redoubled, the Xiongnu threw themselves recklessly at overwhelming the Han army, but in the end they withdrew once more, leaving behind two thousand dead.

If the prisoner's words were not a lie, the Xiongnu should now break off their pursuit.

It was, after all, no more than the word of a common soldier, and no one thought it so very reliable — yet there was no denying that the officers all felt some small measure of relief.

That night, a Han officer named Guan Gan, a company commander, slipped from the camp and defected to the Xiongnu army.

He had once been a delinquent youth in the city of Chang'an, and the night before he had been publicly denounced and flogged by the colonel, Han Yannian, Marquis of Cheng'an, for some negligence in scouting duty.

Nursing this grudge, he took this step.

It is also said that one of the women put to the sword in the ravine some days before had been his wife.

Guan Gan knew what the Xiongnu prisoner had confessed.

And so, once he had fled to the Xiongnu camp and been brought before the Chanyu, he insisted forcefully that there was no need to fear an ambush, and no reason to withdraw.

He said: the Han army had no reinforcements coming.

Their arrows were all but exhausted.

Their wounded kept mounting, and their march had become exceedingly difficult.

The core of the Han army, he said, consisted of the eight hundred men each led by General Li and by Han Yannian, Marquis of Cheng'an, marked out by yellow and white banners respectively; if tomorrow the pick of the Xiongnu horsemen concentrated their attack there and broke them, the rest would collapse easily — and so on.

The Chanyu was greatly pleased, treated Gan with much favor, and at once rescinded the order to withdraw northward.

The next day, shouting again and again for Li Ling and Han Yannian to surrender at once, the choicest troops of the Xiongnu army attacked, making straight for the yellow and white banners.

Under this onslaught, the Han army was gradually forced back from the plain into the mountains to the west.

In the end they were driven into a mountain valley far removed from the main road.

From the mountains on every side, the enemy poured down arrows like rain.

Try as they might to answer them, their own arrows were now utterly spent.

The five hundred thousand arrows they had carried out from Zhelu Fortress, a hundred to a man, had been shot away, every last one.

Nor was it arrows alone.

Fully half the army's swords, spears, and halberds had been broken or chipped beyond use.

Their swords were broken and their arrows spent, in the most literal sense.

Even so, those who had lost their halberds cut spokes from the wheels of the carts to fight with, and the officers took up short knives to defend themselves.

The valley grew narrower and narrower as they pressed deeper into it.

The Xiongnu soldiers began hurling great boulders down from the cliffs on every side.

This, even more surely than the arrows, swelled the ranks of the Han dead and wounded.

With corpses and piled stones choking the way, further advance became impossible.

That night, Li Ling put on plain clothes — a short-sleeved, short-cut garment — forbade anyone to follow him, and went out alone beyond the camp.

The moon peered out from a gap in the mountains and shone down on the corpses piled thick in the valley.

The night had been dark when they broke camp at Mount Junji, but now, once again, the moon had begun to grow bright.

Between the moonlight and the frost lying thick over the ground, the slope of the hillside looked as though drenched in water.

The officers and men left behind in the camp guessed, from the clothes Li Ling had put on, that he must intend to scout the enemy camp alone, and, given the chance, to close with the Chanyu and die trading blow for blow.

Li Ling was long in returning.

They held their breath and strained for a time to catch some sign of what was happening outside.

From the enemy's ramparts far off on the mountain came the sound of a barbarian pipe.

After a good while had passed, Li Ling lifted the tent flap without a sound and came back inside.

"No good."

He spat out this single word, then sat himself down on the camp stool.

After a while longer he said, to no one in particular, that it seemed there was no way left but for the whole army to die fighting.

No one in the tent spoke.

After a moment, one of the officers broke the silence, recalling that years before, when Zhao Ponu, Marquis of Zhuoye, had been taken alive by the Xiongnu army and had, some years later, escaped and returned to Han, Emperor Wu had not punished him for it.

Reasoning from that precedent, he said, surely the Son of Heaven would know how to treat Li Ling with due regard, even should he flee back to the capital — Li Ling, who with so small a force had struck such terror into the Xiongnu.

Li Ling cut him off.

Set aside, for the moment, my own fate, he said. If they had even a few dozen arrows left, they might at least manage to break out of the encirclement — but as things stood, without a single arrow among them, by dawn tomorrow the whole army would have no choice but to sit and be bound.

If, however, they broke through the encirclement this very night and scattered like birds and beasts, each man for himself, then perhaps some among them might yet make their way to the frontier and report the state of the army to the Son of Heaven.

By his reckoning, their present position had to be somewhere in the mountains north of Mount Digan, and it was still several days' march to Juyan, so there was no telling whether such an attempt would succeed — but even so, was there any road left to them now, other than this?

The assembled officers nodded their assent.

Every officer and man in the army was given two sheng of dried rations and a piece of ice, and was told to make, come what may, straight for Zhelu Fortress.

Meanwhile, all the banners and standards of the Han camp were lowered, cut apart, and buried in the ground, and every weapon and war-cart that might be of use to the enemy was likewise smashed to pieces.

At midnight, the drum was sounded and the troops were roused.

Even the sound of the drum came out dull and lifeless, without carrying.

Li Ling, mounted on horseback together with Colonel Han, took the lead with more than a dozen picked fighting men behind him.

Their plan was to break through the eastern mouth of the gorge into which they had been driven that day, come out onto open ground, and then run south.

The early moon had already set.

Catching the Xiongnu off guard, fully two-thirds of the army did manage, as planned, to break through the rear exit of the gorge.

But they were set upon almost at once by the pursuing enemy cavalry.

Most of the men on foot seemed to have been cut down or taken, but several dozen who had seized enemy horses in the confusion of the fighting whipped those barbarian mounts and rode south.

Having shaken off the enemy's pursuit, and having counted, upon the pale flat sands faintly white even in the dark of night, that more than a hundred of his men had gotten clear, Li Ling turned back once more toward the carnage at the mouth of the gorge.

He himself bore several wounds, and his war coat was heavy and soaked with his own blood mixed with that of others.

Han Yannian, who had been at his side, was already dead, cut down in battle.

Having lost his officers and lost his entire army, there was no longer any face left with which to appear before the Son of Heaven.

He gripped his halberd anew and rode once more into the chaos of battle.

In the darkness, amid a melee so confused that friend and foe could scarcely be told apart, Li Ling's horse seemed to be struck by a stray arrow and pitched suddenly forward.

At almost the same instant — which came first, no one could say — Li Ling, drawing back his spear to thrust at the enemy before him, took a heavy blow to the back of the head from behind and lost consciousness.

As he fell from his horse, Xiongnu soldiers bent on taking him alive piled upon him, ten deep and twenty deep, and threw themselves down on top of him.

II

The five thousand men of the Han army who had set out north in the ninth month reached the frontier fort in the eleventh month as a defeated remnant of fewer than four hundred, exhausted, wounded, and without their general.

News of the defeat reached the capital of Chang'an at once by relay courier.

Emperor Wu, contrary to expectation, did not fly into a rage.

For if even the main force under Li Guangli had suffered such a crushing defeat, there had never been any reasonable ground for great expectations of Li Ling's small detachment.

Besides which, he was convinced that Li Ling must surely have died in battle.

Only Chen Buluo — who had lately come as Li Ling's messenger from the northern desert bearing word that "the front is unchanged, morale exceedingly high"

(and who, honored for bringing such good news, had been made a Gentleman of the Palace and had remained on in the capital) — only he, as matters now stood, found he had no choice but to take his own life.

It was a pitiful thing, but there was nothing to be done about it.

Then, in the spring of the following year, the third year of Tianhan, word came that Li Ling had not, after all, died in battle.

Definite word arrived that he had been taken prisoner and had surrendered to the enemy.

Only then did Emperor Wu erupt in true fury.

More than forty years had passed since his enthronement.

The emperor was by now nearing sixty, yet the fierceness of his temper had grown even more violent than in the vigor of his youth.

Fond of the doctrines of the immortals and a believer in magicians and shamans of every kind, he had already, by this time, been deceived more than once by sorcerers he had trusted absolutely.

This great emperor, who had reigned for more than fifty years at the very peak of Han power, had, ever since middle age, been dogged relentlessly by an uneasy fascination with the world of spirits.

For that very reason, disappointment in that quarter struck him as an especially heavy blow.

Blows such as this planted, with each passing year, a dark suspicion of his ministers in a mind that had by nature once been open and expansive.

Li Cai, Qinghuo, Zhao Zhou — chancellor after chancellor was put to death in succession.

Gongsun He, the present chancellor, was said to have wept openly before the emperor, in dread of what fate awaited him, at the very moment he received the seal of office.

Since the retirement of that man of iron principle, Ji An, those who now surrounded the emperor were, if not flattering courtiers, then cruel officials.

Now, Emperor Wu summoned his chief ministers to deliberate on how Li Ling was to be dealt with.

Li Ling's person was not in the capital, but the disposition of his wife, children, kin, and property would depend on how his guilt was determined.

A certain minister of justice, notorious for his severity, was ever skilled at reading the emperor's mood and at bending the law within the letter of legality to suit the imperial will.

When someone once reproached him, invoking the authority of the law, he answered thus.

What the former ruler holds to be right becomes statute; what the present ruler holds to be right becomes ordinance.

What law, he asked, could there possibly be beyond the will of the reigning sovereign?

All the assembled ministers were cut from the same cloth as this minister of justice.

Chancellor Gongsun He, Censor-in-Chief Du Zhou, the Grand Master of Ceremonies Zhao Di, and all the rest — not one of them was willing to risk the emperor's wrath by speaking up for Ling.

They denounced Li Ling's treasonous conduct in the harshest terms they could muster.

They declared, one after another, that it now filled them with shame to think they had once stood shoulder to shoulder at court with a turncoat such as Ling.

They found themselves in perfect agreement that every single one of Ling's past actions had, in fact, been suspicious all along.

Even the arrogance of Ling's cousin Li Gan, who presumed on the crown prince's favor, was made into fresh grounds for slandering Ling.

Those who held their tongues and let no opinion escape them were, in the end, the ones who bore Ling the greatest goodwill — but even they could be counted on one's fingers.

There was, however, one man who watched all this with a bitter expression on his face.

Were not these very men, who now slandered Li Ling in the harshest of terms, the same ones who, only a few months before, had raised their cups when Li Ling left the capital, toasting the boldness of his venture?

And were they not, again, the very same men who, when the messenger came from the northern desert reporting that Li Ling's army still stood, had praised him — worthy grandson of the great general Li Guang — for the lone army's valiant struggle?

To this man it seemed a strange thing indeed — these high officials who could feign, with such perfect composure, to have forgotten the past, and this sovereign who, though shrewd enough to see through their flattery, still refused to lend an ear to the truth.

No — not strange, really.

He had known, sickeningly well and since long ago, that this was simply the nature of men — yet knowing it changed nothing of how repugnant he still found it.

As one of the lower grand masters standing in attendance at court, he too was called upon for his opinion.

And at that, this man spoke up and praised Li Ling without reservation.

He said:

Looking at Ling's conduct in ordinary times — filial in serving his parents, faithful in dealing with fellow men, ever ready to give himself without a thought for his own safety in service to the nation's urgent need — one must call this truly the bearing of a man devoted to the state; and now, though he has had the misfortune to fail once in his undertaking, it is a matter of the deepest regret that the flattering courtiers at Your Majesty's side, whose only wish is to preserve their own persons and secure their wives and children, should seize upon this single failure of Ling's, exaggerate and distort it, and thereby seek to cloud Your Majesty's clear judgment.

Consider, indeed, this campaign of Ling's: leading fewer than five thousand foot soldiers deep into enemy territory, he wore down the tens of thousands of the Xiongnu's own troops with running pursuit, fought his way across a thousand li, and even when his arrows were spent and his road exhausted, still his whole army drew their empty bows and fought a death struggle against the bare blade.

Even the famed generals of antiquity could hardly have surpassed him in winning the hearts of his men and moving them to give their utmost even unto death.

Though his army was defeated, the record of his splendid fighting is surely worthy of being proclaimed to all the realm.

It may well be, I think, that his surrender to the enemy rather than death was undertaken in secret hope of one day, from within that land, repaying some debt to Han...

The assembled ministers were astonished.

They had never imagined that a man capable of saying such a thing could exist in this world.

Fearfully they glanced up at Emperor Wu's face, the temples of which had begun to tremble.

Then, considering what fate must await this man who had dared to call them ministers concerned only with preserving their own persons and keeping their wives and children safe, they allowed themselves a thin smile.

No sooner had that reckless man — the Grand Historian, Sima Qian — withdrawn from the emperor's presence than one of those "ministers concerned only with preserving their own persons and keeping their wives and children safe"

brought to Emperor Wu's ears word of the close relationship between Qian and Li Ling.

There were even those who said that the Grand Historian, having some old grudge against the Ershi General, praised Ling only in order thereby to bring down the Ershi General, who had marched out beyond the frontier ahead of Ling and won no merit for it.

In any case, the unanimous opinion was that, for a mere Grand Historian whose office was no more than the charge of the stars, the calendar, and divination and sacrifice, such an attitude was altogether too insolent.

Oddly enough, it was Sima Qian, and not Li Ling's family, who came to be punished first.

The next day he was handed over to the minister of justice.

His sentence was fixed as castration.

Among the corporal punishments practiced in China since ancient times, the four chief ones were tattooing the face, cutting off the nose, cutting off the feet, and castration.

In the reign of Emperor Wen, Emperor Wu's grandfather, three of these four had been abolished, but castration alone had been left standing.

Castration was, of course, that grotesque punishment which unmakes a man as a man.

It was also called the punishment of rot, some said because the wound gave off a putrid smell, others because the man so treated became like rotten wood that could bear no fruit.

Those who had undergone this punishment were called eunuchs, and needless to say, most of the palace eunuchs had come to their station by exactly this route.

Of all people, it was Sima Qian who now suffered this punishment.

But while the Sima Qian we of later ages know as the author of the Shiji is a great name, the Sima Qian who was then Grand Historian was nothing more than an insignificant clerk of the pen.

Certainly his mind was clear enough, but he was known, at most, as a man too confident in that very mind of his — poor at getting on with others, a man who would never yield an argument to anyone, nothing more than a stubborn, cantankerous eccentric.

No one was particularly surprised that he had met with this punishment of rot.

The Sima family had originally been historiographers under the Zhou.

Later they entered the service of Jin, then served Qin, and once the Han dynasty had come, it was Sima Tan, four generations on, who served Emperor Wu and held the post of Grand Historian during the Jianyuan era.

This Tan was Qian's father.

Besides his specialties of pitch-pipes, the calendar, and the Book of Changes, he was deeply versed in Daoist teaching, and broadly conversant with the Confucians, Mohists, Legalists, and Logicians alike — yet he gathered all of this under a single, unified view of his own and made it entirely his.

His unshakable confidence in his own mind and force of will was passed on, whole and entire, to his son Qian.

The greatest piece of education he gave his son was this: once the transmission of learning was complete, he sent him on a great journey through the whole realm.

It was an unusual method of education for the time, but it goes without saying how enormously it later benefited the historian Sima Qian.

In the first year of Yuanfeng, when Emperor Wu went east to ascend Mount Tai and offer sacrifice to Heaven, Sima Tan — a man of hot blood, who happened at the time to lie ill at Zhounan — grieved bitterly that he alone should be unable to accompany the emperor on this auspicious occasion when the House of Han first established its feng sacrifice, and, consumed by this indignation, died of it.

The compilation of a comprehensive history spanning past and present had been the great wish of his entire life, but in the end he had gotten no further than gathering his materials.

The scene of his final moments is described in detail, in his son Qian's own hand, in the closing chapter of the Shiji.

According to this account, Sima Tan, knowing he would never rise from his bed again, called Qian to him, took his hand, and earnestly explained to him the necessity of compiling a history, weeping in grief at his own worthlessness in having become Grand Historian and yet never having taken up this task, so that the deeds of wise rulers and loyal ministers lay buried in the earth for nothing.

"When I am dead, you will surely become Grand Historian. And when you become Grand Historian, do not forget what I have wished to set down and compile."

This, he said, would be the greatest act of filial piety he could render him, and as he repeated again and again that Qian must bear this in mind, Qian bowed his head, tears streaming down, and swore that he would never go against his father's command.

Two years after his father's death, Sima Qian did indeed succeed to the post of Grand Historian.

He longed to make use at once of the materials his father had gathered, together with the secret books held in the palace archives, and take up this calling handed down from father to son — but the first task laid upon him after his appointment was, instead, the reform of the calendar.

He was absorbed in this work for a full four years.

When he finally completed it in the first year of Taichu, he set to work at once on the compilation of the Shiji.

Qian was, at that time, forty-two years old.

His plan for the work had long since taken shape in his mind.

The form his planned history would take resembled none of the histories that had come before it.

As a standard for moral judgment he held the Spring and Autumn Annals in high regard, but as a history conveying fact, he could never find it satisfying, however he looked at it.

He wanted more fact.

Fact, rather than moral lesson.

With the Zuo Commentary and the Discourses of the States, to be sure, there is fact.

As for the narrative skill of the Zuo Commentary, there is nothing to do but marvel at it.

But there is no inquiry into the individual men who made up those facts, one by one.

Vivid as the depiction of their figures within the events might be, what Sima Qian found unsatisfying was the lack of any investigation into the background of each man, into what had brought him to do the thing he did.

Moreover, all the histories that had come before seemed aimed chiefly at letting the people of a given age know what had gone before them, and seemed to lack, far too much, any preparation for letting the people of the future know their own age.

In short, what Sima Qian wanted was something that could not be found, however one searched, in the existing histories.

Just where the existing histories fell short seemed, even to him, a thing that could only become clear once he had actually written out what he himself wished to write.

The urge to give expression to the murky, pent-up mass within his own breast came before any critique of the existing histories.

Indeed, his critique could only ever manifest itself in the form of creating something new himself.

He had no confidence that the design he had long carried in his head could rightly be called history at all.

But whether or not it could be called history, he was confident, at least, that a thing of this kind was precisely what most needed to be written — for the men of his own time, for later ages, and above all for himself.

He too, in imitation of Confucius, took as his policy "to transmit, not to create" — though his version of transmitting-not-creating differed considerably in substance from that of Confucius. For Sima Qian, a mere chronological listing of events did not yet even rise to the level of "transmitting"

— while, on the other hand, moral verdicts so heavy-handed that they kept later generations from knowing the facts themselves seemed to him to belong, rather, to "creating"

— to that very category.

A hundred years and five generations had now passed since Han had settled the realm, and the books that the First Emperor's anti-cultural policies had destroyed or driven into hiding were at last beginning to circulate again in the world; one could feel, welling up everywhere, a mood in which letters were on the verge of flourishing anew.

It was not the Han court alone, but the age itself, that was demanding the emergence of history.

For Sima Qian personally, the passionate resolve instilled by his father's dying charge, joined now to the full ripening of his learning, his powers of observation, and his skill with the brush, had at last begun to ferment toward the production of some single, unified whole.

His work progressed remarkably well.

It went, if anything, so smoothly that it became almost a source of trouble.

For through the early Annals of the Five Emperors and on through the Annals of Xia, Yin, Zhou, and Qin, he had remained little more than a technician, arranging his materials and striving for precision and rigor in his account — but once he passed the First Emperor and entered upon the Annals of Xiang Yu, that technician's composure began to grow uncertain.

At any moment, it seemed, Xiang Yu might possess him, or he might possess Xiang Yu.

King Xiang then rose in the night and drank within his tent.

There was a beautiful woman.

Her name was Yu.

Ever favored, she followed him.

His swift horse was named Zhui, and he always rode it.

Thereupon King Xiang, in grief and passion, sang out and composed a verse of his own, which ran: "My strength plucked up mountains, my spirit covered the world; but the times favor me not, and Zhui will not go. Zhui will not go — what, then, is to be done? Yu, oh Yu — what shall I do with you?"

So it ran.

He sang it through several times, and the beautiful woman echoed him in accompaniment.

Tears fell from King Xiang's eyes in several streams.

All those about him wept as well, and none could bear to lift his eyes and look upon him...

Was this right?

Sima Qian wondered.

Was it permissible to write in a manner so feverish, so carried away?

He was, of "creating,"

extremely wary.

His own task was, entirely, a matter of "transmitting"

— nothing more.

And in fact, he had done no more than transmit.

But what a vividly living way of transmitting it had been!

It was writing that no one lacking an extraordinary power of imaginative vision could ever have managed.

At times, so afraid was he of "creating,"

that on rereading what he had already written, he would strike out any phrase that seemed, by its presence, to make a figure of history leap to life as though a living, present man.

And, sure enough, that figure would then stop breathing, its vitality extinguished.

In this way, at least, the danger of "creating"

was, one supposed, averted.

But — Sima Qian thought — surely this way, Xiang Yu would cease to be Xiang Yu at all.

Xiang Yu, the First Emperor, King Zhuang of Chu — they would all become one and the same man.

To describe different men as though they were the same man — what sort of "transmitting"

is that?

"To transmit"

surely means transmitting different men as the different men they are, does it not?

Thinking this through, he found he had no choice, after all, but to restore the phrases he had cut.

Once he had put them back as they were and read the passage through again, he finally felt at ease.

No — not only he.

It seemed that the figures of history set down there — Xiang Yu, Fan Kuai, Fan Zeng, all of them — could at last settle, easy in their minds, each into his proper place.

When in good humor, Emperor Wu was truly a lofty, open-minded, and understanding patron of letters and learning, and because the post of Grand Historian required a modest, specialized skill of its own, Sima Qian had also been spared the insecurity of position — or of life itself — that came from the factional cliques and their slanders and intrigues so endemic to official circles.

For several years, Sima Qian passed his days in a fullness one might fairly call happiness.

(What people of that age understood by happiness differed enormously in substance from what we understand by it today, but the seeking of it was, all the same, unchanged.)

He was a man incapable of compromise, but through and through of a sunny disposition — arguing freely, growing angry freely, laughing freely, and taking greatest pride, above all, in demolishing his opponents in debate until not a scrap of their argument remained standing.

And then, after several years of this, this calamity fell upon him without warning.

In the dim, half-lit silkworm chamber — for after the operation of castration, one had to avoid exposure to wind for a time, and so a sealed, darkened room was built, kept warm with a fire lit inside it, and the man who had undergone the punishment was placed there for several days to recover his strength.

Because the warm, dark place resembled a room for raising silkworms, it was called the silkworm chamber. —

In a confusion beyond all words, he leaned against the wall in a daze.

Before any rage, he felt something more like sheer astonishment.

For execution by the sword, or for being granted death by imperial command, he had of course long been prepared, as a matter of course.

He could well picture his own figure meeting death by execution, and indeed, at the very moment he had spoken up in praise of Li Ling against Emperor Wu's wishes, he had harbored some misgiving that things might go wrong and end in a sentence of death.

But that, of all the many punishments there were, he should meet with precisely the most degrading of them — castration!

It was careless of him, one might say — for if one expects a sentence of death, one ought logically to expect every other punishment as well — but though he had considered that an unforeseen death might lie in wait somewhere in his fate, that something so ugly as this should suddenly appear had never once, not for a moment, crossed his mind.

He had always held to something like a conviction that to each man there befalls only what is fitting to that man, and nothing else.

This was an idea he had come to naturally over his long years of handling historical fact.

Even in the same adversity, a man of passionate, high-minded temper would meet with a fierce, searing suffering, while a man of weak and feeble nature would meet with a slow, damp, sordid suffering — so it went, in his thinking.

Even if a fate seemed, at first glance, ill-fitting, at least the way a man went on to meet it would in time reveal that it had, after all, been fitting to him.

Sima Qian believed himself a man.

Clerk of the pen though he was, he was convinced that he was more a man than any warrior of his generation.

Nor was this his own conviction alone.

On this one point, it seemed, even those least well disposed toward him could not help but concede it.

And so, in keeping with his own conviction, he had been able to picture, as lying somewhere ahead of him, even a death by being torn apart by chariots.

That he, with age drawing near fifty, should meet with this disgrace instead!

It felt to him like a dream, that he should now be lying here in the silkworm chamber.

He wanted to believe it was a dream.

But when he opened the eyes he had shut while leaning against the wall, he saw, there in the dimness, three or four men with lifeless faces, as though their very souls had been drawn out of them, lying sprawled or slumped about the room.

The moment he realized that those figures were, in short, himself as he now was, a cry that was neither sob nor roar tore its way out of his throat.

In the midst of those days of anguished rage and inner turmoil, there came to him at times, out of the habit of thought bred by his scholarship, a certain reflection — a self-examination.

It was the question, namely, of what — of whom — of exactly what in whom — had been at fault in this whole affair.

Since this was, after all, that country whose way of lord and vassal differed fundamentally from Japan's, he naturally resented, first of all, Emperor Wu.

For a time, the truth was that this resentment alone left him no room whatever to consider anything else.

But once that spell of frenzy had passed, the historian in him began to stir awake.

Unlike the Confucian scholars, he knew how to apply a historian's discount even to the worth of former kings, and so he did not let personal grudge distort his judgment of Emperor Wu, a later king, either.

Whatever else might be said, Emperor Wu was a great sovereign.

For all his faults, so long as this ruler held the throne, the realm of Han would not shift so much as a hair's breadth.

Setting Gaozu aside for the moment, even the benevolent Emperor Wen and the illustrious Emperor Jing seemed small figures beside this sovereign.

It could not be helped that in a man so great, even his faults appeared great in proportion.

Even in the depths of his extreme resentment, Sima Qian never forgot this.

The thought that this whole affair could, in the end, be understood only as a visitation of some sudden storm and thunderbolt wrought by Heaven itself drove him toward an ever more despairing indignation, and yet, at the same time, it drew him, in the opposite direction, toward resignation.

Since his resentment could not, in the long run, be directed at the sovereign, it inevitably turned instead toward the treacherous ministers at his side.

They were the ones at fault.

Certainly that was so.

But this fault of theirs was, after all, a thoroughly secondary sort of fault.

And besides, to a man of such high self-regard, these petty men felt unsatisfying even as objects of resentment.

Never before had he felt such anger toward the mere "good fellow" as he did now.

This was, if anything, more troublesome than the treacherous ministers or the cruel officials.

At the very least, watching them from the sidelines was infuriating.

Cheaply at peace with their own conscience, and, precisely because they let others be at peace as well, all the more outrageous for it.

They neither defended nor argued against anything.

Within themselves, there was neither reflection nor self-reproach.

Chancellor Gongsun He was the very model of this type.

Even among men equally given to flattery and appeasement, a fellow like Du Zhou — who had lately maneuvered his predecessor Wang Qing into disgrace and made himself Censor-in-Chief in the process — surely knew perfectly well what he was; but this good-natured chancellor lacked even that much self-awareness.

Called a minister who thought only of preserving his own body and keeping his wife and children safe, a man of this sort would probably not even take offense.

Men of this kind were not even worth the trouble of resenting.

In the end, Sima Qian sought some place to lay his resentment within himself.

If, in truth, there had to be something for him to be angry at, then in the end there was nothing left but himself.

But where, exactly, had he himself gone wrong?

That he had spoken up for Li Ling — however he turned it over in his mind, he could not think this had been a mistake.

Nor did he think his manner of doing so had been particularly clumsy.

So long as one refused to sink into flattery, there had been no other way it could have been done.

If, then, a man's own conscience finds nothing to reproach, surely a man of true honor must accept, whatever the outcome, the consequences of that blameless act.

Yes, that much, at least, must certainly be true.

And so, whether it meant being dismembered or cut in two at the waist, he had meant to accept whatever came, so long as it was a punishment of that kind.

But this castration — the state to which his own body had, as a result, now been reduced — this was another matter entirely.

Even among mutilations, it was a thing utterly different in kind from having one's feet or one's nose cut off.

It was not a punishment that ought ever to be inflicted on a man of honor.

This alone — this condition of the body — was, view it from whatever angle one liked, an unmitigated evil.

There was no room here for any dressing-up of words.

And whereas a wound to the heart alone might in time heal, this ugly reality of his own body would continue, unaltered, until the day he died.

Whatever the motive behind it, that which brought about such a result must, in the end, be reckoned "wrong"

— that much had to be said.

But where had he gone wrong?

Where, in himself?

Nowhere had he gone wrong.

He had done nothing but what was right.

If one were forced to name it, it was only the bare fact of "I exist"

that had been at fault.

One moment he sat in a dazed, hollowed-out stupor; the next he sprang up and paced the dark, warm room, groaning like a wounded beast.

As he repeated these motions without thinking, his thoughts likewise circled round and round the same spot, never coming to any resolution.

Except for the few times he lost himself and beat his head bloody against the wall, he made no attempt to take his own life.

He wanted to die.

How good it would have been, if only he could.

A shame many times more terrible than death itself was driving him on, so there was not the least fear of dying in him.

Why, then, could he not die?

Partly, no doubt, it was that there was no instrument in his cell with which to kill himself.

But beyond that, something within him was holding him back.

At first he did not realize what it was.

Amid his frenzy and his indignation, even as he felt the temptation toward death come upon him again and again in fits, he sensed, vaguely, that something else was refusing to let his feelings turn all the way toward self-destruction.

There are times when one has the feeling of having forgotten something, without being able to say clearly what it was.

It was very much like that.

Only after he had been released and returned home to live in confinement there did he realize that during this month of frenzy he had utterly forgotten, in the confusion of it all, the compilation of history that was the great work of his whole life — and yet that even while he had forgotten it on the surface, some unconscious concern for that work had, all the while, secretly been holding him back from suicide.

His father's heart-rending words, spoken weeping on his deathbed ten years before as he charged him with his dying command, still lingered at the bottom of his ears.

But it was not only his father's words that kept him, even now, in the depths of this extremity of pain and grief, from ever giving up the compilation of history.

More than anything, it was the work itself.

This was not any pleasant thing like the allure of the work, or a passion for it.

It was, without doubt, an awareness of his mission to compile history, but it was not the sort of proud, self-reliant awareness that holds itself high.

He had been a man of terribly strong ego, but this affair had made him ponder, to the very depths, just how utterly worthless a thing he himself was.

However grandly he might have boasted of his ideals and ambitions, in the end he had been nothing more than some insect by the roadside, crushed underfoot by an ox.

"The self"

had been miserably crushed, yet the meaning of the work of compiling history remained beyond doubt.

Having been reduced to so wretched a body, and having lost every last shred of confidence and self-reliance, that he should nonetheless go on living in the world and devote himself to this work could not, however he looked at it, be called a happy thing.

It felt to him almost like some fated bond between two people who, however much they might loathe each other, are never permitted to sever the tie between them to the very end.

In any case, this much had become clear: that he could not kill himself, for the sake of this work — and this not out of any sense of duty, but through a more physical, bodily bond with the work itself.

In place of the blind, animal groaning and suffering of the moment, a more conscious, more human suffering now began.

To his distress, the more it became clear that he could not kill himself, the more it also became clear that there was no way to escape his anguish and shame except by suicide.

Sima Qian, the Grand Historian, as a man in the full sense — as one true man among men — died in the spring of the third year of Tianhan.

And after that, the one who carried on the history he had left half-written was nothing but a copying machine without perception or consciousness — there was no way left but to make himself believe exactly that.

Forced though it was, he tried to believe it.

The work of compiling history had, without fail, to be continued.

This, for him, was an absolute.

For the work of compiling history to go on, he had to go on living, however unbearable it was.

And to go on living, he found it absolutely necessary to make himself believe that he himself was already dead.

Five months later, Sima Qian took up his brush once more.

With neither joy nor excitement, driven on by nothing but the will to complete his work, he carried the manuscript forward step by weary step, like a traveler dragging an injured leg toward some destination.

He had by now been relieved of the post of Grand Historian.

Emperor Wu, feeling some small regret, later raised him to Palace Secretary, but promotion or demotion in office no longer held any meaning for him at all.

The Sima Qian who had once been such a formidable debater now ceased to open his mouth at all.

He neither laughed nor grew angry.

Yet his was by no means a downcast figure.

If anything, people saw in his silent bearing a kind of ferocity, as though he were possessed by some evil spirit.

He begrudged even the hours of sleep at night, and pressed on with his work.

To the members of his household, he seemed like a man in a fever to finish his work as swiftly as possible, so that he might, at last, win for himself the freedom to die by his own hand.

After about a year of this grim, unremitting effort, he discovered at last that even after every joy of living had been entirely lost, the joy of expression alone could still survive.

But even by that time, his utter silence remained unbroken, and the ferocity in his bearing was not softened in the slightest.

As he continued the manuscript, whenever he came to a passage where he had to write the characters for "eunuch" or "castrated slave," a groan would escape him without his meaning it.

Whether alone in his room or lying on his bed at night, whenever this thought of humiliation suddenly stirred within him, a hot, throbbing sensation, as if a branding iron had been pressed against him, would instantly race through his whole body.

He would leap up involuntarily, let out some strange cry, pace about groaning, and only after a while, clenching his teeth, force himself to grow calm again.

III

When Li Ling, who had lost consciousness amid the chaos of battle, woke inside the Chanyu's tent, lit by animal fat and warmed by burning dung, he made up his mind on the instant.

There were only two roads left him: to cut off his own head and be spared the disgrace, or else to go along with the enemy for the present and, when the chance came, escape — bearing with him some feat of arms sufficient to atone for the defeat of his army — and Li Ling made up his mind to choose the latter.

The Chanyu untied Li Ling's bonds with his own hands.

His treatment after that was of the utmost courtesy.

The Chanyu Qiedihou, younger brother of the previous Chanyu Gulihu, was himself a powerfully built man in his middle years, big-eyed and red-bearded, of imposing stature.

He admitted frankly that although he had fought against Han under the reigns of several Chanyu before him, he had never yet encountered so formidable an enemy as Li Ling, and, invoking the name of Ling's grandfather Li Guang, he praised the splendor of Ling's fighting.

The valorous name of Li Guang, the Flying General who once killed a tiger bare-handed and drove an arrow into solid rock, was still told and retold as far as the land of the barbarians.

That Ling received such generous treatment was because he was the descendant of a strong man, and because he himself was strong.

It was the Xiongnu custom, when food was portioned out, for the strong and vigorous to take the choicest of it, leaving whatever remained to the old and the weak.

Here, the strong were never made to suffer disgrace.

Li Ling, the surrendered general, was given a yurt of his own and several dozen attendants, and was treated with all the courtesy due an honored guest.

For Li Ling, a strange new life began.

His dwelling was a felt-curtained yurt; his food, the strong-smelling meat of the herds; his drink, whey, animal milk, and fermented milk wine.

His clothing was a felt robe stitched together from the hides of wolf, sheep, and bear.

Herding, hunting, and raiding — beyond these, their life held nothing else.

Even this boundless high plateau had boundaries marked by rivers, lakes, and mountains: apart from the Chanyu's own directly ruled lands, the territory was divided among the Worthy Kings of the Left and Right, the Luli Kings of the Left and Right, and the lesser princes beneath them, with the herding peoples confined, each in turn, to their own bounds.

It was a land with neither walled cities nor cultivated fields.

Though there were settlements of a sort, they shifted their ground with the seasons, following the grass and water.

Li Ling was granted no land of his own.

He was kept always at the Chanyu's side, together with the other generals under the Chanyu's command.

Li Ling watched for any opening to take the Chanyu's head, should the chance arise, but no such chance came easily.

Even supposing he did succeed in striking the Chanyu down, to escape afterward carrying his head would, short of some extraordinary stroke of fortune, have been all but impossible.

If he killed the Chanyu in a mutual death-blow here in the barbarian land, the Xiongnu were bound to bury their own disgrace in silence and ambiguity, so word of it would almost certainly never reach Han.

Li Ling waited patiently for the arrival of that chance, seemingly impossible though it was.

Besides Li Ling, there were several other Han men who had surrendered, serving under the Chanyu.

One of them, a man named Wei Lü, was not a military man, but had been given the rank of King of Dingling and was employed by the Chanyu in the weightiest of matters.

His father was a Xiongnu, but for particular reasons Wei Lü had been born and raised in the Han capital.

He had served Emperor Wu, but some years before, fearing implication in the affair of Li Yannian, Commandant of Music, he had fled and gone over to the Xiongnu.

With such blood in him, he took to barbarian ways with speed, and being a man of considerable ability besides, he was constantly at the Chanyu Qiedihou's councils, taking part in every scheme.

Li Ling scarcely spoke with this Wei Lü, nor with any of the other Han men who had surrendered and now lived among the Xiongnu.

There seemed to him no one among them fit to be entrusted with a share in the plan he carried in his mind.

For that matter, among these Han men themselves there seemed to exist some strange, uneasy feeling toward one another, so that they did not associate closely even among themselves.

On one occasion the Chanyu summoned Li Ling and asked his instruction on a matter of military strategy.

Since it concerned a campaign against the Eastern Hu, Ling gave his opinion readily and without hesitation.

The next time the Chanyu sought the same kind of counsel from him, it concerned strategy against the Han army.

Li Ling's face showed his distaste plainly, and he would not open his mouth.

Nor did the Chanyu press him for an answer.

A good while after that, he was asked to march south as one of the commanders of a force raiding Dai and Shangjun.

This time Li Ling flatly refused, saying he could not go into battle against Han.

After that, the Chanyu never again made such a demand of Ling.

His treatment remained, all the same, unchanged.

There seemed no ulterior purpose behind it at all; it seemed only that a man of true worth was being treated as such, for its own sake.

Whatever else might be said, Li Ling felt that this Chanyu was, in truth, a man.

The Chanyu's eldest son, the Worthy King of the Left, began to show a strange fondness for Li Ling.

It was closer, really, to respect than to mere fondness.

He was a young man barely past twenty, rough in his ways but courageous and earnest.

His admiration for strength was, in truth, both pure and fierce.

He first came to Li Ling asking to be taught mounted archery.

As for the riding half of mounted archery, he was skilled enough to lose nothing beside Ling.

Indeed, in the skill of riding bareback he far surpassed Ling, and so Li Ling confined himself to teaching only the archery.

The Worthy King of the Left became an eager pupil.

When Ling spoke of his grandfather Li Guang's superhuman skill in archery, the young barbarian's eyes would light up as he listened, wholly absorbed.

The two of them often went out hunting together.

With only the barest handful of attendants along, the two would race freely back and forth across the wilderness, shooting fox, wolf, antelope, eagle, and pheasant.

Once, as evening drew near and their arrows were nearly spent — their horses having far outrun their attendants — the two of them found themselves surrounded by a pack of wolves.

They whipped their horses and broke free by driving through the pack at full gallop, and in that moment, when one wolf leapt at the haunches of Li Ling's horse, the young Worthy King of the Left, riding behind, cut it cleanly in two through the body with his curved sword.

When they examined their mounts afterward, both horses had been bitten and torn by the wolves and were covered in blood.

After such a day, at night in the tent, as they blew on the day's catch tossed into a stew and slurped it down, Li Ling would sometimes find himself feeling something very like friendship for this young son of a barbarian king, his face glowing in the firelight.

In the autumn of the third year of Tianhan, the Xiongnu once again raided Yanmen.

In retaliation, the following year, the fourth of Tianhan, Han gave the Ershi General Li Guangli a great army of sixty thousand cavalry and seventy thousand infantry, and sent him out from Shuofang, with Lu Bode, Commandant of the Crossbowmen, leading ten thousand foot soldiers in support.

In addition, Yinyu General Gongsun Ao set out for Yanmen with ten thousand cavalry and thirty thousand infantry, and Roving Cavalry General Han Yue set out for Wuyuan with thirty thousand infantry.

It was the greatest campaign against the north in recent memory.

The moment the Chanyu received this report, he had all the women, the old and the young, the herds, and the possessions moved at once to the land north of the Yuwu River — the Kerulen — and led ten thousand crack horsemen himself to meet the armies of Li Guangli and Lu Bode on the great grassland south of the river.

They fought continuously for more than ten days.

In the end, the Han army had no choice but to withdraw.

The young Worthy King of the Left, who studied under Li Ling, led a separate force eastward, met the Yinyu General, and defeated him utterly.

Han Yue's force, the left wing of the Han army, also gained nothing and withdrew its troops.

The northern campaign was a complete failure.

As always, Li Ling did not appear at the front in battles against Han, and had withdrawn north of the river, but he was startled to discover himself secretly anxious over the fortunes of the Worthy King of the Left in battle.

Of course, on the whole, he had certainly hoped for a Han victory and a Xiongnu defeat, yet it seemed that he alone did not want the Worthy King of the Left, in particular, to lose.

When Li Ling realized this, he condemned himself bitterly for it.

When Gongsun Ao, defeated by that same Worthy King of the Left, returned to the capital and was thrown into prison on the charge of having lost many soldiers and won no merit, he offered a strange excuse in his defense.

An enemy prisoner, he claimed, had said that the strength of the Xiongnu army came from the fact that General Li, who had surrendered from Han, was constantly training their troops and imparting strategy to prepare them against the Han army.

This, of course, was no excuse for his own army's defeat, and so the Yinyu General's guilt went unpardoned — but needless to say, Emperor Wu, on hearing this, flew into a rage against Li Ling.

Ling's family, once pardoned and returned home, was again thrown into prison, and this time every one of them — from Ling's aged mother down to his wife, his children, and his younger brother — was put to death.

As is ever the way with the shallow judgment of the world, it is recorded that the gentry of Longxi at that time — Li Ling's family being of Longxi stock — all felt it a shame that their district had produced the House of Li.

This news reached Li Ling's ears about half a year later, from the mouth of a Han soldier who had been carried off from the frontier.

On hearing it, Li Ling sprang up, seized the man by the collar, and shook him roughly as he demanded to know once more whether it was true.

Once he was certain there was no mistake, he clenched his teeth and, without meaning to, put all his strength into his two hands.

The man writhed and let out a groan of agony.

Ling's hands had, without his knowing it, closed around the man's throat.

When Ling let go, the man fell heavily to the ground.

Without so much as a glance at him, Ling burst out of the tent.

He walked out across the plain in wild disorder, no direction in mind.

A fierce fury whirled inside his head.

When he thought of his aged mother and his young children, his heart felt as though it were burning, and yet not a single tear came.

Perhaps rage too fierce simply dries up the tears.

Nor was this the only such case.

What treatment, after all, had his family received from Han up until now?

He thought of the last days of his grandfather, Li Guang.

(Ling's father, Danghu, had died several months before Ling was born.

Ling was what is called a posthumous child.

And so it was this famous grandfather who had raised and trained him through his boyhood years.)

Li Guang, the great general, though he had won great merit in several northern campaigns, was thwarted by treacherous flatterers at the ruler's side and never once received his due reward.

While the various generals under him went on, one after another, winning rank and marquisates, this incorruptible general alone had had to be content, far from any marquisate, with an unbroken, unchanging poverty to the very end.

In the end he had come into conflict with Grand General Wei Qing.

Wei Qing himself did, to be sure, feel some consideration for the old general, but one of the officers under his command, borrowing the tiger's authority for himself, disgraced Li Guang.

In his fury, the old and famous general cut off his own head there on the spot — within the very camp itself.

Ling still remembered clearly, even now, himself as a boy, weeping aloud when he heard of his grandfather's death...

And what of the end of Ling's uncle, Li Gan, Li Guang's second son?

He had resented Wei Qing over his father's wretched death, and had gone himself to the Grand General's residence and disgraced him there.

Furious over this, the Grand General's nephew, Swift Cavalry General Huo Qubing, shot Li Gan dead during a hunt at the Ganquan Palace.

Emperor Wu, knowing full well what had happened, had it announced, in order to shield the Swift Cavalry General, that Li Gan had died from being gored by a deer's antler...

.

Unlike Sima Qian's case, Li Ling's was a simple matter.

Fury was everything.

(Apart from the regret that, however unreasonable it might have been, he ought to have carried out sooner the plan he had long held — to take the Chanyu's head and escape the barbarian land —) the only question that remained was how he was to give that fury expression.

He recalled the words that man had spoken a moment before: "His Majesty flew into a rage on hearing that General Li, in the barbarian land, was training troops and preparing them against Han..."

— he called this to mind.

And at last it came to him.

He himself, of course, had no memory of any such thing, but there was another surrendered Han general named Li Xu.

He had once, as Commandant Beyond the Passes, guarded Xihou Fortress, and ever since surrendering to the Xiongnu he had been constantly imparting strategy and training troops for the Xiongnu army.

Indeed, just half a year before, he had followed the Chanyu into battle against the Han army — though not against Gongsun Ao's force in question.

This must be it, Li Ling thought.

Being alike General Li, he must certainly have been confused with Li Xu.

That night, he went alone to Li Xu's tent.

He said not a word, and let the other say not a word either.

With a single thrust, Li Xu fell dead.

The next morning Li Ling went before the Chanyu and confessed what had happened.

There was no need to worry, the Chanyu said.

Except that his mother, the Grand Yanzhi, would make something of a fuss over it — for it seemed that the Chanyu's mother, despite her considerable age, had carried on an improper affair with Li Xu.

The Chanyu was well aware of it.

By Xiongnu custom, when a father dies, the eldest son inherits all his late father's wives and concubines as his own, but his own birth mother alone is excepted from this.

Even a people given, as extremely as they were, to holding men above women, kept at least this much reverence for the mother who bore them. — For now, the Chanyu added, he wished Ling to keep himself hidden in the north for a while, and once things had cooled down he would send someone to fetch him back.

Following these words, Li Ling took his attendants and withdrew for a time to the foot of Mount Douxian — Elin Dabanling — to the northwest.

Before long, the Grand Yanzhi in question died of illness, and when Li Ling was called back to the Chanyu's court, he seemed to those around him a changed man.

For he, who until then had absolutely refused any part in strategy against Han, now announced, on his own initiative, that he would take part in such counsel.

The Chanyu, seeing this change, was greatly pleased.

He appointed Ling as King of the Right Colonel-General, and gave him one of his own daughters in marriage.

The offer of a daughter's hand had been made before as well, but Ling had refused it every time until now.

This time, however, he took her as his wife without hesitation.

Just then, an army was setting out south to raid the region around Jiuquan and Zhangye, and Ling himself asked to join it.

But when the route they took southwest happened to pass by the foot of Mount Junji, even Ling's heart clouded over.

Thinking of the men who had once followed him here and fought their death-fight at his side, and walking upon that sand where their bones lay buried and their blood had soaked in, as he considered his own present state, he found he no longer had the courage to march south and fight against Han soldiers.

Pleading illness, he alone turned his horse back north.

The following year, the first year of Taishi, the Chanyu Qiedihou died, and the Worthy King of the Left, who had been close to Ling, succeeded him.

This was the Chanyu Hulugu.

The heart of Li Ling, now King of the Right Colonel-General among the Xiongnu, still remained unresolved.

The resentment of having had his mother, wife, and children wiped out to the last had penetrated to the very marrow of his bones, and yet, as his recent experience had made plain, he was unable to lead troops himself into battle against Han.

He had sworn never again to set foot on Han soil, but whether he could truly be assimilated into Xiongnu ways and live out his life at peace in them — even with his friendship for the new Chanyu — he still, even now, could not be sure.

Hating, as he did, to think things through, whenever he grew restless he would always ride out alone on a swift horse into the wilderness.

Beneath a sky of unbroken autumn blue, hooves clattering, he would drive his horse on like a madman, over grassland and hill alike, caring for neither.

After tearing on for tens of li, once both horse and rider had grown weary, he would seek out some small stream in the high plateau, dismount at its bank, and water his horse.

Then he himself would lie flat on his back in the grass, and in a pleasant daze of fatigue gaze up at the purity, the height, the vastness of the blue vault of heaven.

Ah, I too am but a single grain of dust between heaven and earth — what, then, could Han and barbarian possibly matter? — such a thought would sometimes come over him.

After resting a while, he would mount again and gallop off recklessly.

Exhausted from riding the whole day through, he would finally return to camp only when the yellow clouds had grown dim with the setting sun.

Fatigue alone was his one and only salvation.

Someone brought word that Sima Qian had spoken up for Ling and had, in consequence, been condemned.

Li Ling felt neither particular gratitude nor particular pity at this.

He and Sima Qian knew each other by sight and had exchanged greetings, but theirs had never been a relationship close enough to call friendship.

If anything, he had thought of the man as no more than an irritatingly argumentative fellow.

Besides, the Li Ling of now was far too absorbed in the struggle against his own single suffering to feel, in any real sense, the misfortune of another.

He did not go so far as to feel it an unwelcome interference, but it is a fact that he felt no particular remorse over it either.

The customs of the barbarian land, which had at first struck him simply, across the board, as coarse and absurd, gradually came to make sense to Li Ling as neither coarse nor unreasonable at all, once he considered them against the actual climate and terrain of the land itself.

Without thick leather barbarian dress, one could not survive the winters of the northern desert, and without a diet of meat, one could not store up strength enough to endure the cold of that land.

Their failure to build fixed dwellings, too, was a necessity arising from the very form of their way of life, and it was wrong to dismiss it out of hand as some lower form of existence.

If one insisted on clinging to Han ways to the very end, one could not survive even a single day of life amid the nature of the barbarian land.

Li Ling remembered something the former Chanyu, Qiedihou, had once said.

Objecting to how the people of Han, at every second word, called their own country a land of ritual propriety and regarded the conduct of the Xiongnu as little better than that of birds and beasts, the Chanyu had said this.

What is this thing the Han people call ritual propriety?

Is it not merely another name for the hollow decoration that dresses up ugly things in a beautiful surface, and nothing more?

In the love of gain and the envy of others, which is the worse, the man of Han or the man of the steppe?

In lust for pleasure and greed for wealth, which again is the worse?

Strip away the surface, and in the end there can be no difference at all.

It is only that the men of Han know how to conceal and adorn it, while we do not know how — that is all.

Citing as examples the internecine strife among kin that had run through Han since its founding, and meritorious ministers hounded down by intrigue, the Chanyu left Li Ling almost at a loss for reply.

For in truth, as a man of arms, he himself had, on more than one occasion before, felt doubts about ritual observed for the sake of tedious ritual and nothing else.

He came to think that, in truth, the rough honesty of barbarian custom was very often far more agreeable than the sly malice of the Han people hidden behind the shadow of some fine-sounding name.

To take it for granted from the outset that the customs of the Chinese states were right and those of the barbarians base seemed to Li Ling, more and more, an all too characteristically Han prejudice.

For instance, he had until now believed, without any real reason, that a man simply had to have a courtesy name in addition to his given name — but on reflection, there was nowhere any actual necessity for such a name at all.

His wife was an exceedingly gentle, quiet woman.

Even now, whenever she came before her husband, she grew shy and could barely bring herself to speak.

Yet the baby boy born between them was not in the least afraid of his father, and would come toddling up to climb onto Li Ling's knee.

Gazing into the child's face, Li Ling would sometimes find himself suddenly recalling the likeness of the child he had left behind in Chang'an years before — the one who had, in the end, been killed together with his mother and grandmother — and, before he knew it, a look of blank despondency would come over him.

Even before Ling surrendered to the Xiongnu — a full year earlier, in fact — the Han Palace Attendant Su Wu had already been detained in the barbarian land.

Su Wu had originally been sent as an envoy of peace, for the exchange of prisoners.

But because his deputy envoy happened to become entangled in some internal strife among the Xiongnu, the entire delegation ended up being taken captive.

The Chanyu did not try to kill them, but threatened them with death in order to force their surrender.

Su Wu alone refused to consent to surrender, and, seeking to avoid disgrace, took up a sword himself and drove it through his own chest.

The treatment the barbarian physicians gave the unconscious Su Wu was a most peculiar thing.

The Book of Han records that they dug a pit in the ground, filled it with smoldering embers, laid the wounded man upon it, and trod upon his back to force the blood out.

Thanks to this drastic treatment, Su Wu, unfortunately for him, did revive after half a day of unconsciousness.

The Chanyu Qiedihou became thoroughly captivated by him.

Some weeks later, once Su Wu's body had finally recovered, the Chanyu sent his close attendant Wei Lü to urge his surrender once more, and earnestly.

Wei Lü met with a scalding torrent of abuse from Su Wu, and, thoroughly disgraced, withdrew from the effort.

The story of how, after that, Su Wu was shut up in a cellar and staved off his hunger by mixing felt fibers with snow and eating them, and the story of how he was at last exiled to that uninhabited place by the shore of the Northern Sea — Lake Baikal — and told he would be permitted to return only once a ram gave milk, are, along with his name from those nineteen years of holding fast to his staff of office, far too well known to need retelling here.

In any case, by the time Li Ling had finally been forced to resign himself to burying the rest of his troubled life in the barbarian land, Su Wu had already, for a long while, been tending sheep alone by the shore of the Northern Sea.

To Li Ling, Su Wu was a friend of twenty years' standing.

They had once, at the same period, both served as Palace Attendants.

Stubborn and unyielding in his ways though he might be, Ling had always considered him without question a man of rare, unbending integrity.

Not long after Su Wu set out for the north in the first year of Tianhan, when his aged mother died of illness, Ling had accompanied her funeral procession as far as Yangling.

It was just before Ling's own departure on the northern campaign that he heard the rumor that Su Wu's wife, concluding there was no hope of her husband's return, had left him and married into another household.

At the time, Ling had been bitterly indignant, on his friend's behalf, at the fickleness of his wife.

But once he himself had, unexpectedly, come to surrender to the Xiongnu, he no longer wished to see Su Wu at all.

He felt, if anything, relieved that Wu had been exiled far to the north, sparing him the need to face him.

Especially after his own family had been put to death and he had lost all wish to return to Han again, he wanted, all the more, to avoid a meeting with this "shepherd who still bore the Han staff of office"

— that was how he thought of him.

Several years after Chanyu Hulugu succeeded his father, word spread for a time that Su Wu's fate, whether alive or dead, was unknown.

Recalling the existence of this unbending Han envoy whom his father the Chanyu had never once managed to make surrender, Chanyu Hulugu asked Li Ling to go and confirm whether Su Wu was safe, and, if he still lived, to urge his surrender once more.

He had heard that Ling was Wu's friend.

Having no choice, Ling set out for the north.

He went north up the Guju River, and from its confluence with the Zhiju River pressed on further to the northwest, cutting straight through forest country.

After several days of advancing along a riverbank still patched with snow in places, when the blue waters of the Northern Sea at last began to come into view beyond forest and field, a guide from the local Dingling people led Li Ling's party to a single wretched log hut.

The hut's occupant, startled by the rare sound of human voices, came out with bow and arrow in hand — and even after Li Ling had found, in the shaggy-bearded, bear-like face of this wild man of the mountains, wrapped in fur from head to foot, the likeness of his old friend Su Ziqing, former Superintendent of the Imperial Stables, some further time was still needed before the other could recognize, in this great barbarian-robed official before him, the former Commandant of Cavalry, Li Shaoqing.

Su Wu, for his part, had not heard so much as a word that Ling was now serving the Xiongnu.

For one instant, sheer emotion overwhelmed whatever it was within Ling that had, until now, kept him from meeting Wu at all.

At first, neither of them could scarcely say a word.

Several yurts belonging to Ling's attendants were set up nearby, and this uninhabited waste suddenly grew lively.

Wine and food brought along for the occasion were carried at once into the hut, and that night the rare sound of merry laughter startled the birds and beasts of the forest.

The stay lasted several days.

Even so, explaining the circumstances that had brought him to wear barbarian dress proved a painful thing indeed.

Yet Li Ling told only the facts, without mixing in the least tone of self-justification.

The life Su Wu described so offhandedly, across those several years, had evidently been utterly wretched.

Some years before, the Xiongnu King of Wuqian, out hunting, had happened to pass this way, taken pity on Su Wu, and supplied him with clothing and food for three years running — but since that king's death, Su Wu said, he had been reduced to digging field mice out of the frozen earth to stave off starvation.

The rumor of his uncertain fate seemed to have been a garbled report of how his entire flock had been carried off by roving bandits, down to the last animal.

Ling told him only that his mother had died, but could not, after all, bring himself to say that his wife had abandoned their child and gone to another household.

Li Ling wondered what this man was living for.

Was he still hoping for the day he might return to Han?

Judging from the way Su Wu spoke, however, he seemed to hold not the slightest such hope any longer.

Then for what was he enduring these wretched days?

Were he to offer his surrender to the Chanyu, he was certain to be given a position of high importance — but that Su Wu was not the man to do such a thing had been obvious from the very start.

What puzzled Ling was, in essence, why the man had not simply ended his own life sooner.

That Li Ling himself could not, with his own hand, cut short this hopeless life of his was because of the many ties of affection and obligation that had, before he knew it, taken root in this land, and because dying now would no longer amount to any particular act of loyalty toward Han.

Su Wu's case was different.

He had no ties of that kind here.

Considered purely from the standpoint of loyalty to the House of Han, there seemed to be no particular difference between starving forever in the wilderness while holding fast to the imperial staff, and simply burning that staff at once and cutting off his own head.

It was unthinkable that Su Wu, who had, at the moment of his capture, driven a blade straight into his own chest, should now, of all times, have suddenly grown afraid of death.

Li Ling recalled the stubbornness of Su Wu's younger days — a willfulness so obstinate it had been almost comical, a bullheaded refusal to bend.

The Chanyu was trying to bait Su Wu with promises of glory and fortune, out of the depths of his utter destitution.

To be lured by the bait was, of course, one form of defeat — but to kill himself, unable to bear the hardship, would likewise mean losing to the Chanyu (or to that fate the Chanyu embodied).

Might this not be how Su Wu thought of it?

Yet the figure of Su Wu, seemingly locked in a contest of will against fate itself, did not strike Li Ling as either comical or absurd.

If it was mere stubbornness that let him laugh off, with perfect composure, hardships and privations beyond imagining, the bitterest cold, and utter solitude — and to go on doing so, moreover, for however long a stretch of years lay between now and death — then this was a stubbornness that had to be called truly terrifying, and truly magnificent.

Li Ling marveled to see how what had once looked, in Su Wu's younger days, like a somewhat childish stubbornness had grown into an endurance of such vast proportions.

And this man, moreover, did not expect that his conduct would ever become known even to Han.

Not only did he not expect ever to be welcomed back to Han, he did not even expect that anyone would ever appear to report — to Han, let alone to the Xiongnu Chanyu — that he was struggling against such hardship in this uninhabited land.

On that final day, when he would surely die alone with no one at his side, he meant, looking back on his own life, to die content simply in having laughed off fate to the very end.

It made no difference to him at all if not a single soul ever came to know what he had done.

Li Ling, for his part, had once aimed at taking the head of the previous Chanyu, yet even should he have achieved that purpose, he had feared that, unless he could also escape the Xiongnu land carrying it with him, the act would come to nothing and word of it would never reach Han — and so, in the end, he had never found the moment to carry it out.

Standing before Su Wu, who felt no anxiety at all over whether he was ever known to anyone, Ling secretly felt something like a cold sweat break out on him.

After the initial rush of emotion had passed, and as two days, then three, went by, Li Ling could not help but feel some kind of unease taking shape within him.

Whatever they spoke of, the contrast between his own past and Su Wu's caught at him again and again.

He did not think it out quite so bluntly as Su Wu the righteous man, and himself the traitor — but before the severity that Su Wu had forged, over these many years, out of the silence of forest and field and water, he could not help but feel his own suffering until now — the sole justification he had for his own conduct — utterly crushed and overwhelmed, without a moment's resistance.

And besides, whether it was only his imagination or not, as the days went by he began to sense in Su Wu's manner toward him something like the way a rich man treats a poor one — the manner of someone aware of his own superiority, trying to be generous toward the other.

He could not say exactly where, but at odd moments, unexpectedly, he would suddenly sense something of that kind.

What Li Ling, King of the Right Colonel-General clad in splendid sable furs, feared more than anything was the faint tinge of pity that would sometimes surface in the eyes of the ragged, threadbare Su Wu.

After staying about ten days, Li Ling took his leave of his old friend and went south again, downcast.

He left behind at the log hut in the forest a plentiful store of food and clothing.

In the end, Li Ling never once broached the matter of the surrender he had been charged by the Chanyu to urge.

Su Wu's answer was plain without even asking, and Ling felt there was no need, at this late date, to demean either Su Wu or himself with such an appeal.

Even after returning south, not a single day passed when the existence of Su Wu left his mind.

Thought of from a distance, the figure of Su Wu seemed to loom before him all the more sternly, if anything.

Li Ling himself did not consider his own act of surrendering to the Xiongnu a good thing, but he had believed that if one weighed what he had done in service of his homeland against how that homeland had, in return, repaid him for it, even the most heartless critic would still have to grant that it had been "unavoidable"

— he had believed as much, at least.

And yet here was a man before whom, however "unavoidable"

the circumstances might appear, he would never once permit himself to think, "this cannot be helped"

— such a way of thinking he would never allow himself at all.

Neither hunger, nor bitter cold, nor the suffering of solitude, nor the coldness of his own homeland, nor the near-certainty that his hard-won integrity would in the end be known to no one at all — none of these, to this man, counted as circumstances unavoidable enough to require him to alter the principles he had always held.

To him, the mere existence of Su Wu was at once a lofty lesson and an infuriating nightmare.

From time to time he sent men to inquire after Su Wu's welfare, and sent gifts of food, cattle and sheep, and felt rugs.

The desire to see Su Wu and the desire to avoid him were forever at war within him.

Several years later, Li Ling once more visited the log hut by the shore of the Northern Sea.

On the way, he happened to meet some guards stationed north of Yunzhong, and heard from them that along the Han frontier of late, everyone from the governor down to officials and common people alike had taken to wearing white.

If the people had all put on white clothing, it could only mean mourning for the Son of Heaven.

Li Ling thus learned that Emperor Wu had died.

When he reached the shore of the Northern Sea and told him this, Su Wu turned to face south and wailed aloud.

He wept and grieved for days on end, until at last he began to vomit blood.

Watching this, Li Ling felt himself sinking, little by little, into a dark and heavy mood.

He did not, of course, doubt the sincerity of Su Wu's grief.

He could not help but be moved by such pure, fierce sorrow.

And yet not a single tear would rise in himself.

Su Wu had not, as Li Ling had, had his whole family put to death, yet even so, his elder brother had been made to take responsibility and forced to suicide over some minor traffic mishap during an imperial procession, and his younger brother had likewise been made to take responsibility and forced to suicide for failing to apprehend some criminal.

However one looked at it, it was hard to say that the Han court had ever treated him generously.

Knowing all this, and now watching before his very eyes Su Wu's pure, anguished weeping, Li Ling discovered for the first time that beneath what he had once seen only as Su Wu's fierce stubbornness, there had all along been welling up a love for the land of Han beyond all comparison, clear and cold and pure — not righteousness or fidelity imposed from without, but the most natural, the most deeply personal of affections, ever-flowing and impossible to suppress however one tried.

Li Ling found himself confronted by the fundamental thing that separated him from his friend, and could not help but be driven, whether he wished it or not, into a dark doubt about himself.

When he returned south from Su Wu's place, an envoy from Han had just arrived.

He was an envoy of peace, come to announce the death of Emperor Wu and the enthronement of Emperor Zhao, and, at the same time, to establish friendly relations for the time being — relations that had never once lasted so much as a year.

As it happened, the men who came on this mission were, quite by chance, Ren Lizheng of Longxi and two others, all old acquaintances of Li Ling's.

In the second month of that year Emperor Wu died, and when eight-year-old Crown Prince Fuling succeeded to the throne, his father's edict named Huo Guang — Palace Attendant and Commandant of the Imperial Chariots — to help govern as Grand Marshal and Grand General.

Huo Guang had originally been close to Li Ling, and Shangguan Jie, who had become General of the Left, was likewise an old acquaintance of Ling's.

Between the two of them, a plan had been worked out to call Ling back.

It was for this very reason that old friends of Ling's had been deliberately chosen for this mission.

Once the envoys had concluded their official business before the Chanyu, a lavish banquet was held.

It was usually Wei Lü who took on the role of host on such occasions, but since this time it was Li Ling's friends who had come, he too was drawn out and made to join the banquet.

Ren Lizheng saw Ling, but with the high Xiongnu officials all arrayed before him, he could not simply tell him to return to Han.

Across the distance of their seats, he would catch Li Ling's eye and signal to him, and repeatedly ran his hand over the ring of his sword hilt, trying to convey his meaning in secret.

Ling saw this.

He guessed, more or less, what the other man was trying to tell him.

But he did not know with what gesture he ought to answer.

After the formal banquet ended, Li Ling, Wei Lü, and the others remained behind and entertained the Han envoys with beef, wine, and games of chance.

It was then that Ren Lizheng spoke to Ling.

In Han, he said, a general amnesty had now been declared, and all the people were enjoying the benevolent rule of peace.

Since the new emperor was still a child, he said, Ling's own old friends Huo Zimeng and Shangguan Shaoshu were now assisting the sovereign and managing the affairs of the realm.

Lizheng, regarding Wei Lü as a man who had become, entirely and completely, a barbarian — which, in fact, he undoubtedly was — hesitated to speak to Ling openly in front of him.

He tried, instead, merely by naming Huo Guang and Shangguan Jie, to draw at Ling's heart.

Ling remained silent and gave no answer.

After gazing steadily at Lizheng for a while, he ran a hand over his own hair.

That hair, too, was now bound up in the mallet-shaped knot of the steppe, no longer in the Chinese style at all.

After a while, Wei Lü left his seat to change his clothes.

For the first time, with no reserve in his voice, Lizheng called out Ling's courtesy name.

"Shaoqing — how great must your suffering have been, all these many years?"

Huo Zimeng and Shangguan Shaoshu, he said, sent their regards.

As if talking over Ling's distant, formal reply asking after the two men's wellbeing, Lizheng spoke again.

"Shaoqing, come back."

"What do wealth and rank matter, after all?"

"Please — say nothing, just come back."

Having so lately returned from Su Wu's place, Li Ling was not unmoved by his friend's earnest words.

But there was no need even to think it over — it was, by now, a thing beyond all remedy.

"It would be easy enough to go back. But would it not mean only meeting with disgrace all over again? What do you say?"

Before he could finish, Wei Lü returned to his seat.

The two of them fell silent.

When the gathering broke up and they parted, Ren Lizheng drew casually close to Ling and, in a low voice, asked once more whether he truly had no intention of returning.

Ling shook his head.

A man of honor, he answered, could not bear to be disgraced a second time.

That his words carried so little spirit was not out of any fear that Wei Lü might overhear.

Five years later, in the summer of the sixth year of Shiyuan under Emperor Zhao, Su Wu — who had seemed destined to die unknown and in want somewhere in the north — came, by pure chance, to be able to return to Han.

That famous story — of how the Han emperor, hunting in the Shanglin Park, took a wild goose with a letter from Su Wu bound to its leg — was, of course, a fabrication invented to overcome the Chanyu's insistence that Su Wu was already dead.

A man named Chang Hui, who had accompanied Su Wu to the barbarian land nineteen years before, met with the Han envoy, informed him that Su Wu was still alive, and taught him this lie as a means of securing Wu's release.

A messenger was at once sent flying to the Northern Sea, and Su Wu was brought out to the Chanyu's court.

Li Ling's heart, even so, was thrown into turmoil.

Whether or not Su Wu could return again to Han made no difference to his greatness, and so it could hardly change how much of a scourge he remained to Ling's own conscience — and yet the thought that Heaven, after all, had been watching struck Li Ling to the core.

It seemed as though it were not watching, and yet Heaven, after all, was watching.

He was seized with a solemn dread.

Even now, he did not think his own past had been wrong — and yet the fact that there existed, here, a man named Su Wu, who had openly and magnificently accomplished the very thing that made even Li Ling's own past — which surely had not been unreasonable — feel shameful to him, and that this man's achievement was now, moreover, about to be proclaimed to the whole realm, was, however he looked at it, more than Li Ling could bear.

Li Ling was seized with an overwhelming dread that this raw, wrenching, unmanly feeling clawing at his chest might, in fact, be nothing but envy.

On the occasion of their parting, Li Ling held a banquet for his friend.

There was a mountain of things he wanted to say.

But in the end it all came down to this: where, exactly, his own intentions had lain at the moment he surrendered to the barbarians.

— and to the circumstance that, before he could carry out that intention, his whole family in his homeland had been put to death, leaving him no way left to return.

To say any of it aloud would only become mere complaint.

He said not a single word about it.

Only, when the feast had reached its height and he could bear it no longer, he rose to his feet and, dancing, sang out a song.

For ten thousand li I journeyed, crossing the desert sands,

a general for my lord, I struck hard against the Xiongnu.

The road ran out, my arrows spent, my blade shattered;

my soldiers destroyed, my name already brought low.

My aged mother already dead — though I long to repay the debt I owe, where now is there for me to return?

As he sang, his voice trembled, and tears ran down his cheeks.

Even as he scolded himself for such unmanly weakness, there was nothing he could do about it.

After nineteen years, Su Wu returned home to his native land.

Sima Qian, meanwhile, went on writing, diligently, without pause.

Having ceased to live in this world, he now lived only as the figures within his book.

His mouth, which would never again open in real life, spoke fire and fury for the first time only by borrowing the tongue of Lu Zhonglian.

At times he became Wu Zixu and had his own eyes gouged out; at times he became Lin Xiangru and berated the King of Qin; at times he became Crown Prince Dan and wept as he saw Jing Ke off.

When he set down the grief and indignation of Qu Yuan of Chu, and quoted at great length the Lament for the Sands that Qu Yuan composed just as he was about to cast himself into the Miluo River, Sima Qian could not help feeling, try as he might otherwise, that the poem was somehow his own.

Fourteen years had passed since he first took up the manuscript, and eight since the calamity of castration had befallen him.

Around the time the witchcraft trials broke out in the capital and the tragedy of the Crown Prince Li befell the court, this work handed down from father to son — a comprehensive history following, on the whole, its original design — came, for the first time, to a rough completion.

Several more years passed as he added to it, revised it, cut from it, and polished it further.

The Shiji — one hundred thirty scrolls, five hundred twenty-six thousand five hundred characters — was completed only when the death of Emperor Wu was already close at hand.

When he set down his brush at the last line of the seventieth of the Biographies, the Grand Historian's Own Preface, Sima Qian sat there leaning on his armrest, dazed and blank.

A deep sigh rose up from the very pit of his stomach.

His eyes stayed for a while on the thick foliage of the pagoda tree in the garden before him, but in truth they saw nothing at all.

With hollow, unhearing ears, he nonetheless seemed to be straining to listen to the cry of a single cicada sounding from somewhere in the garden.

Joy ought to have been there, and yet a listless, vague loneliness, an unease, came first instead.

Until he had submitted the completed work to the court and reported its completion before his father's grave, he still held himself taut with purpose, but once these things were done, a terrible hollowness overtook him all at once.

Like a shaman from whom the spirit has departed, body and mind alike collapsed limply, and he, barely past sixty, seemed suddenly to grow feeble as though ten years older.

Neither Emperor Wu's death nor Emperor Zhao's enthronement seemed to hold any meaning any longer for this empty husk that had once been the Grand Historian Sima Qian.

By the time Ren Lizheng and the others mentioned earlier had visited Li Ling in the barbarian land and returned once more to the capital, Sima Qian was already no longer of this world.

Of Li Ling's life after parting from Su Wu, not a single accurate record remains.

Nothing, that is, beyond the fact that he died in the barbarian land in the first year of Yuanping.

By then, Chanyu Hulugu, who had been close to him, had already died some time before, and the throne had passed to his son, Chanyu Huyanti; but conflict had broken out over that succession between the Worthy King of the Left and the Luli King of the Right, and it is not hard to imagine that Li Ling, too, was drawn against his will into that strife, pitted against the Yanzhi and Wei Lü and their faction.

The Xiongnu chapter of the Book of Han records that, afterward, a son Li Ling had fathered in the barbarian land set up the Commandant Wuji as Chanyu, in opposition to Chanyu Huhanye, and that this attempt ended, in the end, in failure.

This took place in the second year of Wufeng under Emperor Xuan, exactly eighteen years after Li Ling's death.

He is recorded only as Li Ling's son; no name is given.