bayedsolid 006 A Short Story of Northwest China with Sandstorm Barrage
006 A Short Story of Northwest China with Sandstorm Barrage
In the fifteenth year of the Kaiyuan era, Guazhou was like a chess piece abandoned by Heaven.
The Tibetan cavalry had just trampled over the city walls, which were now crumbling like an old woman's teeth, crumbling even without a breeze.
The wind, like a blunt knife, shaved the city wall into jagged edges. As Zhang Shougui climbed the city wall, stepping on the rubble, he heard a pipa tune—not the "Yangguan" he was used to, but a Qing Shang melody with a Luoyang accent.
At the end of the music, a minor official wearing a light green robe with a ripped crotch was tuning a zither. His sleeve slipped down, revealing a dazzlingly white wrist.
She looked up, and the cinnabar mole on her nose resembled a drop of blood about to fall: Zhen Xiaosi, candidate for acting registrar of the Court of State Ceremonial, was ordered to teach the people of Guazhou to sing.
Zhang Shougui was stunned for a moment, then suddenly burst into laughter: This dilapidated city, where even birds refuse to land, has instead attracted a beautiful little vixen who can sing.
The minor demons may not perform, but the newly appointed governor Zhang Shougui insists on putting on a grand show on such ruins.
On the day Zhang Shougui took office, the setting sun was like blood. He reached out and touched the broken surface of the city wall, his fingertips covered with sand from a thousand years ago.
"This city is dead," he suddenly sighed to the old soldier beside him. "We must bring it back to life first."
That night, he ordered his soldiers to erect ten tattered flags at the breach, and also ordered the musicians to tune the pipa strings a semitone higher than usual.
At dawn the next day, the Tibetan vanguard army pressed down on the city like dark clouds, only to find a lone figure sitting on the city wall—the governor in scarlet robes tapping a wine cup with ivory chopsticks and singing the old tune of "Yangguan".
The wind whipped up tattered flags, slapping faces like a demon's hand; the crisp sound of the pipa drowned out the thunder of ten thousand hooves. The Tibetan general squinted at the city, seeing Shou Gui raise a cup in invitation. The golden cup traced an arc in the sunlight—falling into the moat, splashing up a secret signal of water…
The 30,000 cavalrymen were thus forced to rein in their horses.
They had seen Tang army formations and walls of long-handled swords, but they had never seen a governor singing songs amidst the ruins.
As evening fell, the words "scout" still trembled in the wind, while a black wall rose into the northwest sky.
Zhang Shougui ordered his soldiers to lower their flags and silence their drums, but he himself dragged Zhen Xiaosi up to the city wall—she was carrying the four strings of Kucha in her arms and had the fish tally of the Honglu Temple hanging from her waist.
At the crack in the city bricks, he poured wine, and she plucked the strings; he tapped the cup, and she sang along. The wine cup was made of cracked bronze, and the strings were temporarily strung with horsehair, but Zhen Xiaosi sang "Midnight Wu Song" so softly and gently, as if she had deliberately sewn murderous intent into the silk.
The Tibetan vanguard squinted and saw a beautiful couple in the setting sun: the governor's scarlet robe was like fire, and the girl's green dress was like a willow. Below the city was a bottomless abyss, and above the city, the sound of music and singing could be heard.
The ambush troops emerged from the hidden channel, and the Tibetans realized they had been tricked and fled in panic.
As the Tibetans retreated, Zhang Shougui suddenly drew his sword and struck a pillar. Immediately, ambushers emerged from the cracks in the city bricks—it turned out that the previous night he had ordered his soldiers to dig open a hidden channel, and five hundred Moli soldiers were lying in ambush at the bottom of the dry moat.
The city was saved, but the irrigation canals were completely destroyed.
Guazhou is like a giant whose blood has been drained, and its farmland is cracked like the shell of an old tortoise.
Zhen Xiaosi volunteered to go to heaven to borrow a river.
Zhang Shougui laughed at her for being foolish, but at dawn the next day, he saw her standing barefoot at the snow line of a branch of the Qilian Mountains, using the court tablet of the Honglu Temple to dig the first snow trench.
She wore the governor's sword at her waist—he had secretly tied it to her last night. The tassel was made of camel thorn, the most common material on the border, dyed red, but tied into the most fashionable love knot in Luoyang.
Three days later, a flash flood arrived, and she clung to the first spruce tree that was swept down, as if she were holding onto the life of the entire Guazhou.
On the day the canal was filled with water, the people knelt on the ground. Zhen Xiaosi stood on tiptoe to brush the sand from Zhang Shougui's temples: "Your Excellency, your city has come back to life. You should return something to me."
He raised an eyebrow. She held out her palm—"I want you to use this to marry me."
Zhang Shougui threaded the red agate hairpin into her hair and whispered: "When the bloodshed in Guazhou stops, I will use this to buy the reddest wedding dress in Luoyang."
Zhang Shougui led his men up a branch of the Qilian Mountains and planted the governor's banner at the snow line.
Three days later, he set up an altar and used blood as ink to write two words on a sheepskin.
That night, a torrent of water roared in, carrying the entire spruce forest down the mountain—the trees looked like rafts carved by the mountain god himself, precisely wedged at the mouth of the canal.
The next day, when the people awoke, they saw that the snowmelt had gently flowed over thousands of acres of barren fields along the newly opened riverbed.
Later, the historian wrote in the "Records of Hexi" that the mountains and rivers had suddenly flooded, but little did he know that Zhang Shougui had privately told his staff: "Mountains also get thirsty; just give them a cup of wine." He was referring to the jar of wine on the altar that had been poured into the cliff.
In March of the seventeenth year of the Kaiyuan era, Zhang Shougui decided to launch a counterattack.
Zhen Xiaosi handed him a piece of sheepskin covered with a star map drawn in cinnabar—she studied at the Honglu Temple and could draw the Big Dipper as a marching route.
On the night of her departure, three thousand lanterns were lit. She stood on the sand ridge of the fifth sandbar and tied the last lantern to her ankle.
The lampshade doesn't contain mutton fat, but whale oil, a secret treasure of the Court of State Ceremonial, which can burn for three hours.
Zhang Shougui turned his head on horseback and saw her suspended at the end of the star map, like a spark blown by the wind.
As the sand dune swallowed the Tibetan vanguard, he heard her singing in the distance—
The sound was torn to pieces by the north wind, yet every word was clear:
The stream flows from the top of the mountain, drifting down the slope...
He suddenly realized that she had also turned herself into a lamp to lure the enemy.
He chose the coldest day of the year to lead three thousand Moli soldiers out of the Fifth Desert—a stretch of shifting sand dunes that even camels refused to tread.
On the eve of the march, he ordered his soldiers to sew three thousand lamps out of sheepskin: frozen sheep fat was suspended inside the lampshade, and the Big Dipper was painted on the outer wall with ink and vermilion.
That night, the entire army marched in silence. The lanterns on the sand dunes formed a moving star map, which the Tibetan scouts saw from afar and assumed that the Tang army had hired them as guides.
The real killer move was underground. Zhang Shougui had ordered his engineers to dig out the base of the sand dunes under cover of night and cover the surface with a thin layer of ice.
The next day, when the Tibetan pursuers arrived, the entire sand dune suddenly collapsed, as if a giant beast had opened its mouth and swallowed the vanguard.
Meanwhile, the Tang army's star map had moved to the city of Datong—the beacon fires southwest of Dunhuang that night were more dazzling than the Lantern Festival.
In the eighteenth year of the Kaiyuan era, peace talks failed, but Zhang Shougui received a new pipa from Chang'an. The rosewood soundboard was engraved with two characters written by Emperor Xuanzong.
He carried his zither to the city wall and discovered that a clump of camel thorns—with tiny red flowers—was sprouting from the cracks in the city bricks that had been pierced by Tibetan arrows years ago.
An urgent imperial edict arrived in Chang'an: the Court of State Ceremonies is in dire need of a female official in charge of matters concerning the Western Barbarians, and Zhen Xiaosi is specifically named.
On the night the imperial decree was received, the moon over Guazhou was as large as a bronze mirror.
Zhen Xiaosi placed the red agate into Zhang Shougui's palm: "Use it to marry Guazhou. I'm going back to Luoyang."
When she turned around, her wedding dress finally turned red—but it was the pomegranate skirt of the Court of State Ceremonial, not the peony red of Luoyang that he had promised.
Zhang Shougui didn't keep anyone; he just played the pipa on the city wall all night, the strings made from the horsehair she had left behind, and the notes from the Qing Shang melody she had taught.
The next morning, the people saw the governor alone holding a scorched-tail zither, with a new line of characters engraved on the zither: "Guazhou is unmarried, Zhenxiao is unmarried."
Shougui suddenly burst into laughter, plucked the strings, and sang: "Have you not seen the bitterness of battle on the battlefield? Even now, we still remember General Li." When he said "General," he deliberately dragged out the word for an extremely long time, startling a flock of wild pigeons outside the city.
As the pigeons flew toward the Qilian Mountains, their wings swept across the sun like a series of ellipses.
Later, the people of Hexi said that whenever the north wind blew sand, they could still hear the sound of a hollow pipa coming from the top of Guazhou city—the old folks said it was the female registrar of the Court of State Ceremonies returning for inspection. Or was it Zhang Shougui who turned victory into a melody that could be passed down through generations?
Zhang Shougui never married, but planted 10,000 camel thorn bushes on a branch of the Qilian Mountains—they bloom with small red flowers in May, like a string of starlight that will never go out.
Someone once saw him sitting alone in the thorn bushes late at night, caressing a blood-red agate that had been polished to a translucent shine...