Chapter Ninety-Three: To the Countryside

A man with a fiercer wife was no great matter. When the door was shut and one could crawl under the bed, the stubbornness of refusing to come out was something every man possessed in one form or another. Yun Hao understood the worth of such a wife. The Yun household was a widow and an orphan, and, as outsiders, it was no easy thing to gain a foothold in Jinyang City. Since the man was only eight years old, the woman had to shoulder more than half the sky. Besides, she had always been the local power in Jinyang.

A centipede may die, yet not stiffen in death; that is the underworld. Wildfire may burn it all away, and spring winds bring it back again; that too is the underworld. Such organizations, grown alongside human progress, exist widely in both East and West. Or rather, wherever there are people, there are two kinds of order. One is the law. The other is the order beneath the law.

Gun Dilon was dead, and Drilling Mountain Leopard was crippled. But there were still many who wanted revenge for Gun Dilon. In truth, those people were not the frightening ones. What was frightening was that you could not tell exactly which among them wanted vengeance. It might be the old man at the tea stall, or the half-grown boy crouched at the street corner. A tattooed arm did not necessarily mean a gangster, and a kind-faced, gentle citizen might well be a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Yun Hao had once seen a tattooed brute give up his seat to an old man, and a bespectacled, refined-looking fellow open his mouth only to spew filth. He had seen fallen women selling their bodies in shampoo parlors because they had paralyzed husbands at home. He had also seen respectable married women go off to rented rooms with men because vanity had taken root in their hearts.

Rocking along in the carriage, his mind began to wander. At home there was a fierce tigress of a wife, and if he wanted to live a little longer, Yun Hao decided he would go into the countryside with Nan Nan and Old Lady Wu to look over the land that belonged to him. When Li Yuan had transferred the fields to him, he and Chai Shao had only taken a cursory look at them.

The Li estate, no, it was now called Yun Family Manor, was not far from Jinyang at all. It was only a dozen or so miles away, and the carriage soon carried Yun Hao and the grandmother and granddaughter of the Nan family to the manor.

This had originally been part of the Li family's vast estate. These five tenant households were responsible for cultivating the several hundred mu of nearby land, and so a village had naturally grown up around it.

The manor was very small, only five households and five courtyards. In the center stood the largest courtyard, once the Li family's summer retreat. It was a three-courtyard residence, and Li Yuan had given it away to Yun Hao without even blinking.

Poverty seemed like original sin, clinging to the Han people like a bone-deep parasite. Since the age of the Five Barbarians' chaos in China, the whole of northern China had suffered severe devastation. The Sui Dynasty had only recently been founded, and the peasants living off the soil had by no means recovered their strength.

The Han people seemed to have forged an inseparable bond with earth itself: they used earth to build city walls, and of course they used earth to build houses too. All were adobe houses, with thick thatched roofs. A hole cut into the gable wall served as a window. Seen from afar in the sunlight, they formed a sheet of pale gold, and were not without a certain rustic beauty. Yet when he thought of the severe winter approaching, Yun Hao's heart sank. Living in such houses, warmth really did depend almost entirely on shivering.

The head of the household had come to inspect the place, and as the man in charge of the manor, Liu Six had already led several household heads to wait at the entrance. The trees along the road were beginning to shed their leaves, and the yellow foliage swirled through the air in the cooling wind. Yun Hao thought the scene deserved to be filmed by Zhang Yimou.

A long line of grown men bowing and scraping before a child was no movie legend, but something truly unfolding before his eyes in a rigidly stratified feudal society. To tenant farmers, the landowner was heaven itself; for these men, Yun Hao was simply playing the role of Heaven.

"Master, what brings you out to the countryside?" Liu Six could not understand why anyone would leave the warm city only to come out here and drink the wind. The high city walls not only kept out the mounted men of the Turks, they also blocked the bite of winter winds. Staying in the city in winter was far more comfortable than staying in a manor out in the wilderness.

"There was nothing to do in the city, so I came out for a walk and to look at the countryside scenery," Yun Hao said, descending from the carriage like a little adult and standing before Liu Six with his head held high and his chest out.

Oh. He was bored out of his mind.

That was what Liu Six really thought, though of course he would never dare say such a damned thing aloud. Yun Hao could not cut him to pieces, but he could always raise the rent. For tenant farmers, there was no worse calamity than a higher land tax.

The blue-brick and tile house Li Yuan had given Yun Hao stood in the middle of the five thatched courtyards, looking extremely grand and imposing. The three-courtyard residence had even been paved with rounded pebbles. No one knew what the builder had been thinking; did he not realize those stones were a torment underfoot?

There were no servants in the courtyard. On ordinary days, only the tenants could be counted on to sweep it. Yesterday, after receiving Zhang Miaoke's message, the whole compound had been cleaned thoroughly.

There were chairs in the main hall, and their style made it obvious they were the work of the Yun family carpenters. The lacquer gleamed brightly; at a glance, one could tell these were newly made.

"Sit, all of you, sit! How has this year's harvest been?" Yun Hao's one sentence was enough to put the old hands with the right to sit in a difficult position.

Liu Six wore a smile on his face while making a squatting horse stance with half his backside perched on the chair. The man beside him had it even worse; after holding out for a while, he began to look as though the three flowers were gathering at the crown of his head and the five breaths were returning to the source.

"To answer the master, our manor has a total of two hundred mu of land. It is cultivated together by our five households. You can see that each household has five or six strong young men. Altogether there are thirty or forty of us. With the women and children added in, there are nearly a hundred mouths to feed. Last year's rent was collected at sixty percent by the garrison office. The remaining forty percent, if everyone tightened their belts a little, was just enough to get through the year. We only hope next year will bring timely wind and rain, so the manor can enjoy a good harvest."

Two hundred mu of land to support nearly a hundred people meant a little more than two mu per person. That black-hearted bastard Li Yuan actually wanted to take sixty percent of the rent. Master Lu Xun had said that when he opened Chinese history, he saw only two words: cannibalism. Now Yun Hao finally understood. This was truly motherfucking cannibalism.

"With only forty percent left, how can that be enough to eat? Why not clear more wasteland? Surely all the nearby land already has owners?" Yun Hao asked in confusion.

"To answer the master, the tax rate at the Duke of Tang's estate is already considered merciful. I hear the imperial estates take as much as seventy percent. You are a noble one, so perhaps you do not know. Land cannot be planted every year forever; human strength has its limits, and so does the land. Every three years or so, the fields have to be left fallow for a year to recover their vitality.

"The land around this manor is not all owned by others, of course. But the ownerless fields are all far from the city. If the Turks were to come raiding, there would be no time to escape into the city. In truth, our manor is already considered far out. Beyond fifty li from Jinyang City, no one dares to farm. Even if they did, the Turks would just seize everything. After a year of hard labor, not only would there be no grain in the end, but one's life would also be in danger." Liu Six seemed to have struck a sore spot, and as he spoke, tears nearly fell.

They were still talking in the house when suddenly a little boy ran in, shouting at the top of his voice, "It's bad, it's bad! Fire! Fire!"