Disease was rampant. Almost no taxes on produce or land were able to be paid, however vicious enforcers became. Some regions, as warfare shifted back and forth across their land, found themselves facing taxation from two or even three different sets of overseers. And with armies needing to be fed—or they might rebel, themselves—what food could make its way to women and children left at home?
If there was a home left. Or children alive. In those years, children were sold for food, or sold as food. Hearts hardened, hearts broke.
One well-known lament, for the conscripted farmer-soldiers and their families, was composed by a poet-mandarin who lived through those years. He was looking back at a black period, after he'd retired from court for the third and final time to one of his country estates.
He wasn't judged to be among the very greatest Ninth Dynasty poets, but was acknowledged as skilled. He was known as a friend of Sima Zian, the Banished Immortal, and later, also, of the equally glorious Chan Du. He wrote:
In time, the rebellion ended. The truth, as historians learn and teach, is that most things end, eventually.
Still, the fact that this is so would not have found a placid acceptance in the burned-out, abandoned shells of farms and villages throughout Kitai in those years. The dead are not assuaged, or brought back, by a philosophic view of events.
The Emperor Shinzu retook Xinan, lost it briefly, then took it a second time and did not lose it. General Xu Bihai reoccupied Teng Pass against incursions from the east. The Ta-Ming Palace was restored, if not to what it had been before.
The emperor's father died and was buried in his tomb near Ma-wai. The Precious Consort, whose name had been Jian, was already there, awaiting him. So was his empress.
People began to return to the capital and to their villages and farms, or to new ones, for with so very many dead there was much land unclaimed.
Trade slowly resumed, although not along the Silk Roads. They were too dangerous now, with the garrisons beyond Jade Gate abandoned.
As a result, no letters came from the west, from places such as Sardia. No dancers or singers came.
No lychee fruits were brought up from the far south, either, carried early in the season by military couriers on imperial roads. Not in those years.
An Rong himself was murdered, perhaps predictably, by two of his generals. These two divided the northeast between themselves, like warlords of old, abandoning any imperial ambitions. The Tenth Dynasty ended, faded away, never was.
The number ten became regarded as bad luck in Kitai for a long time afterwards, among generations that had no idea why this was so.
One of the two rebel generals accepted an offer of amnesty from the Emperor Shinzu in Xinan and turned on the other, joining with imperial armies in a triumphant battle below the Long Wall not far from Stone Drum Mountain. In this battle, two hundred cavalry, four duis, mounted on Sardian horses, played a devastating role, sweeping across the battlefield from left flank to right and back, with a speed and power other riders could only dream about.
Three men, two of them extremely tall, the third with only one hand, watched that fight from the northern edge of the summit of Stone Drum Mountain.
They were expressionless for the most part, except when one or the other would raise an arm and point to the Sardians racing along the lines, a glory amid carnage. When the three old men saw this, they would smile. Sometimes they'd laugh softly, in wonder.
"I would like one of those," said the man with one hand.
"You don't even ride any more," said the tallest one.
"I'd look at it. I'd watch it run. It would bring me joy."
"Why would he give you a Sardian horse?" said the other tall one.
The one with a single hand grinned at him. "He's married my daughter, hasn't he?"
"So I understand. A clever girl. Not dutiful enough, in my view. She's better off having left us."
"Perhaps. And he might give me a horse, don't you think?"
"You could ask. It would be difficult for him to say no."
The smaller man looked at one and then the other of his companions. He shook his head regretfully. "Too hard to say no. That's why I can't ask." He looked down again at the battlefield. "This is over," he said. "It was over before it began."
"You think peace will follow now?"
"Up here perhaps. Not everywhere. We may not live to see peace in Kitai."
"You cannot know that," admonished the tallest one.
"I am pleased, at the least," said the third, "that I lived long enough to have an answer about the wolf. It was honourable of him to send us word. Unexpected."
"You thought he'd die himself when the wolf died?"
"I did. And now he is sending messages to us. It shows we can be wrong. The need for humility."
The small one looked up at him and laughed. "It shows you can be wrong," he said.
The others laughed as well. It is entirely possible, the teachings of the Kanlins suggest, to laugh while the heart is breaking for mankind.
They turned and walked away from the view of the battlefield.
The rebel general who'd accepted the offer of amnesty from Xinan might have expected treachery, might even have been resigned to it, but with the empire so desperately spent it was decided by the new advisers of the new emperor that the offered amnesty should be honoured. The general and his soldiers were allowed to live, and resume their posts defending Kitai.
Soldiers were urgently needed on the Long Wall and in the west and south, before all borders collapsed inwards under waves of barbarian incursions.
Weariness, sometimes more than anything else, can bring an end to war.
It was said to be the case that the emperor's favourite wife, regarded by some later historians as dangerously subtle and too influential, played a role in encouraging him to keep that agreement—with a view to securing Kitai's boundaries.
The first treaty negotiated and signed was with the Tagurans.
The second was with the Bogu. Their new kaghan, Hurok's successor, was a man his people called the Wolf. It wasn't clear why, then or later, but how would civilized people understand the names, let alone the rituals, of barbarians?
There were stories told that the same imperial princess, who was also Shinzu's second wife, understood more than she ought to have about this matter of the Bogu, but the details of this—the documents so vital to a historian—were lost.
Some even said this had been deliberate, but in truth the disruptions of those years, the burnings of cities and market towns, movements of people and armies, emergence of bandits, warlords, disease, and death, were so very great, it was hardly necessary to imagine or assume a purpose on anyone's part if records disappeared.
And it is always difficult, even with the best will in the world, to look back a long way and see anything resembling the truth.
Seasons tumble and pass, so do human lives and ruling dynasties. Men and women live and are remembered—or falsely remembered—for so many different reasons that the recording of these would take seasons of its own.
Every single tale carries within it many others, noted in passing, hinted at, entirely overlooked. Every life has moments when it branches, importantly (even if only for one person), and every one of those branches will have offered a different story.