Buying grain was as fierce as fighting a battle.
Some were knocked this way and that; some were trampled and howled with pain; some were shoved to the back and cursed foully; and some had the money lifted out of their clothes in the confusion...
The chaos made the Kunshan Zhou officials overseeing the grain sale go a little pale. Dodging deeper into the granary, they ordered the soldiers to put down the disturbance.
Fortunately, the common people were not really out to seize the grain—times had not sunk that far yet. They only wanted to buy the charity-granary grain the government was selling cheap. After a spell of squawking chaos, order was restored, and the buyers formed a long queue and shuffled slowly forward.
"Worn notes?" A clerk on loan from Kunshan Zhou waved the baochao in his hand and flicked it back. "Go swap it in the west wing."
In the west wing a dozen or so men sat or stood about. In the middle of them was a pot-bellied squire, chatting and laughing with some official. There was no doubt he was the man who made his living at this trade.
Worn paper money that ordinary folk could not spend, he could spend. You could go to him to exchange it—at a price.
Shao Shuyi glanced toward the west wing and seemed to see Zheng Song there.
No, not "seemed." It was Zheng Song. He was talking with the pot-bellied squire, his gaze wandering idly over the crowd outside, and he even met Shao Shuyi's eyes for a moment—though whether he had recognized him was anyone's guess.
The queue moved on, and soon another man stepped up.
"Counterfeit?" The clerk peered at the note in his hand, and his face changed at once. "Bold as brass! Looks like I'll have to clap you in irons today!"
"I've done nothing wrong, head clerk!" An old man dropped to his knees in a fluster, weeping.
The clerk was unmoved. He sneered, "If you're going to pass fake notes, at least use Jiangxi goods. What is this? Even the characters are wrong or missing—it's laughably fake, and you bring it here to cheat me?"
"This is what I got selling vegetables yesterday—how could it be fake?" The old man looked as though he had taken a heavy blow, and mumbled.
"Spare me the excuses. Men—"
"Let it go." A light cough sounded not far off.
At that, the clerk's expression changed at once. He turned and bowed, answering, "Yes, sir."
That done, he aimed a kick at the old man. "Get lost! Don't block the people behind you."
As he spoke, the counterfeit note was already tucked into his robe, with no attempt at concealment.
Two granary hands came over, pulled the old man to one side, and returned to their places—one to hand out grain, one to keep the record.
The clerk turned to look, then swore at one of them under his breath: "What sort of ghost-scrawl is that? Is that writing? You can read it, I can't, and the officials can't either!"
The granary hand keeping the record looked embarrassed.
He really was not much good at writing, and could not recognize many characters. But was that his fault?
Every sort of local warehouse had a granary officer and granary hands; like the lizheng, zhushou, yuzheng, and fangzheng, they were commoners drafted under miscellaneous corvée duties, neither officials nor clerks. Was it any wonder their learning fell short?
Posts like lizheng, which involved collecting taxes, were still filled by well-off local households; but granary officers and hands only had to look after the stores, so they had always been drafted from ordinary households. Even when the men thus drafted "understood neither writing nor arithmetic" and "bungled the reckoning of goods in and out, time and again delaying matters," and even though local officials repeatedly asked for "salaried clerks" so that "the corvée need not fall on the people," the Great Yuan would not allow it.
Would replacing granary officers and hands with clerks cost no money? Just draft them from commoner households, then swap in a fresh batch after half a year or a year—wouldn't that do? It would save a great deal of money.
So the granary hand really was not to blame. He had been a farmer; that he could scrape together a few characters at all showed some ambition. What more was there to say?
Shao Shuyi watched silently from the queue, thinking it over.
He wondered whether granary hands got their meals. If they did, it would be an excellent post.
In fact Liujiagang had a government-run shipyard, and the yard had granary hands too. They got meals but no wages, and they too were men rounded up for corvée.
Reason it through: if a granary hand was fed two meals a day, even one dry and one thin, that was enough to keep him alive. The drawback was that there was not a single coin in wages—it was work for nothing, and a corvée stint ran half a year or a year. When tax time came and you had no money to hand over, would you not be finished?
There were gains and losses in it.
In his heart Shao Shuyi had already filed this away as a fallback: if he truly found no other way, he could go there and fill his belly, which beat starving to death. The only problem was that the post might be contested—they would not necessarily take him.
While he mused, the queue shuffled forward again, until only one man stood ahead of him.
He produced one Zhiyuan chao note and a dozen or so Zhongtong chao notes, and said, trembling, "Buy... buying rice."
The clerk picked up the notes, looked them over, tossed them into a wooden chest at his side, and said, "Fifteen guan, eight hundred and sixty wen."
The granary hand scrawled it down crookedly, then raised his head and looked at the clerk.
The clerk knitted his brows and thought, then said hesitantly, "Seven dou, six..."
Shao Shuyi's heart began to pound.
For an instant a great many thoughts surfaced in his mind, and in the end they all came down to one: he had to get out of his predicament, and the sooner the better, or he would be lost beyond recovery.
"Seven dou, nine..." The clerk held out his fingers as if calculating.
"Seven dou, nine sheng, three ge," Shao Shuyi blurted out, his head hot.
The clerk started, perhaps because his train of thought had been broken, and shot Shao Shuyi a glare.
Not far away, the official in the green robe lifted his eyelids and looked at Shao Shuyi in some surprise.
Shao Shuyi did not dare stare back, only stole a glance at him: a high nose and deep-set eyes, not the look of a Central Plains man. If he was not mistaken, the man must be a Semu—the Yuan court was especially fond of using Semu people as officials in the fiscal, judicial, and maritime trade offices.
"Seven dou, nine sheng, three ge it is," the clerk said at last, having worked it out, and turned to give his instructions.
Another granary hand took the various containers, weighed out the grain, and poured it into the buyer's hemp sack.
The man thanked them profusely and went off beaming.
A dan of rice for twenty guan—more than ten guan cheaper than the open market. To buy at all was to profit. The Ever-Normal Charity Granary had a capacity of a million dan and claimed to hold three hundred thousand dan of grain; how much it actually held was hard to say. In any case, whenever the harvest failed and they had to sell grain to beat prices down, they sold at most a few thousand dan, never more than ten thousand. It was strictly first come, first served.
"Five guan in Zhongtong chao, two dou five sheng of rice," Shao Shuyi said, stepping up after the man ahead of him had gone, and handed over five notes.
The clerk took them, made a show of examining them, and stole a glance at the Semu official from the corner of his eye. After a moment he sighed faintly and waved a hand at the granary hand beside him: "Two dou five sheng of coarse round-grain rice. Give it to him."
The granary hand naturally had no objection, and handed over the grain briskly.
Shao Shuyi would have liked to linger, but the man behind him was already pushing forward, so he could only turn and leave.
From first to last the Semu official said nothing, which left him somewhat disappointed.
The gamble had not come off.
But he soon let it go: if he got it, that was his luck; if not, that was his fate. If a thing could be done so easily, that would be the strange part.
There would be chances—there would be chances in the future!
The way of war lies in using your strengths and avoiding your weaknesses. He must play to his own strengths, and when a precious chance came, strike once and succeed.
Once outside the charity granary gate, he looked off toward the long embankment.
Inside the embankment shops stood in rows, and snatches of song drifted over: "...I am Li Keyong. I inherited the title of jiedushi of Youzhou; because I struck Duan Wenchu while in my cups, I was banished to the land of the Shatuo, and ten years have passed..."
On the embankment visitors thronged shoulder to shoulder; scholars in long, fluttering sleeves stood facing the wind, seemingly chanting poems: "Men such as Yifu—their turtle-backed steles already stand on the old mounds. All they could do was wave the jade fly-whisk; they never learned to wear a helmet..."
Beyond the embankment the masts stood like a forest, great ships and small ones coming and going, carrying cargo after cargo of goods to every quarter, and from the decks more singing rose: "The dark-faced young boatman sculls the sampan, ferrying the officials out to the great ship. At the very stroke of noon he shifts the rudder first, and all at once lifts his hands to worship the gods of heaven."
What a scene of bustling life!
Shao Shuyi listened in a daze to the end, then laughed at his own foolishness. What did any of it have to do with him? Was Li Keyong such a great man? And who was Yifu anyway?
Getting home to fill his belly, and then thinking about how to change his situation—that was the real business.
* * *
When he got home with the grain on his back, he found Kong Tie sitting inside, greeting him straight away.
Shao Shuyi nodded, first put the coarse round-grain rice into the grain bin in the west room, then picked up a reed-straw cushion and sat down in the doorway. "Baijianu, what brings you back?"
"Thought I'd ask again: Chiliarch Ye's ship still needs two boat crewmen. If you're willing, you can go aboard today—one ding of paper notes a month. Same as when you worked for the Zheng family: meals don't come out of your pay." Kong Tie wasted no words.
His voice was muffled and resonant, but it carried weight, and it was sincere.
Shao Shuyi considered for a moment.
His original body had been on boats, though only around the mouth of the Yangtze, hired alongside his father to carry goods over short runs. By rights he had some feel for handling a boat, even for going to sea, and out on the wind-whipped waves he ought not to be badly seasick.
And the pay really was good.
Li Zhuang worked at the shipyard and was paid at the rate for a household of four, yet he brought in only nine dou of rice, half a jin of salt, and ten guan of notes a month.
The magistrate of a lower-grade county received a monthly stipend of only seventeen guan. Years before, because prices had soared, the court ruled that for every guan of official income an extra dou of rice be issued—so in real terms the magistrate got seventeen guan of Zhongtong chao and one dan seven dou of rice a month. That looked decent, but the man was an official: he had visitors to receive and see off, and many uses for money. It was nowhere near enough, and drove them to take bribes.
Fifty guan for a month at sea was really not bad.
But Shao Shuyi still refused. "I won't go."
Kong Tie looked at him hard. "Then never mind. Only—"
"Only what?" Shao Shuyi asked.
"I heard something just now. Master Chen has run off."
"Which Master Chen?" For a moment Shao Shuyi did not follow.
"Zhushou Chen Wang."
Shao Shuyi was startled. "Truly?"
"Someone saw him pack up his valuables, take a few sacks of grain, hire an ox cart, and head south with his whole family, old and young. When people asked him on the road, Chen Wang put on a bitter face and said he was taking his family into exile, and bade them farewell."
Shao Shuyi was speechless.
That morning the man had come to collect five guan from him; that afternoon he was gone. Was there any need to be so quick?
And it was an absurd flight. In broad daylight, before everyone's eyes, unhurried as you please, even stopping to greet acquaintances and exchange a few words—not a trace of panic.
Heading south, most likely to Suzhou to throw himself on relatives and friends.
Chen Wang was a learned man. Once in Suzhou, with a little help, he could settle in gradually; finding some post to feed his family would not be hard.
Only—now that he was gone, what was Shao Shuyi to do?
"Xiaohu, come with me," Kong Tie could not help urging again. "There'll be someone to look after you on the ship. Once you're aboard, the thieving officials can't lay hands on you even if they want to, and by the time you're back in Liujiagang it'll be months later—the storm may well have blown over. At worst, you'll have a ding of notes to pay off your arrears."
Shao Shuyi neither agreed nor refused.
Having read a great many books from later ages about the age of exploration, he had a clear enough picture of how dangerous seafaring was in these times. A wise man does not stand beneath a tottering wall, and he still had a shred of a modern man's pride; instinctively he felt he would always find an opening.
He looked at Kong Tie. "Do you know which Semu officials there are in the Transport Office or the zhou government?"
Chapter 5