“Yellow Sky”: Crisis for the Han Dynasty sample (Act I) -- T. P. M. Thorne

“Benchu, they chipped away at the Emperor for years to get the Empress labelled as a witch; they used a crippling military defeat of their own disgusting invention to achieve it, it seems!” Cao Cao interrupted. “They didn’t care who suffered for that, and if it is seen by them that any man or woman that is even slightly connected to a person that they’ve wronged is a threat, then-”
“Then they will have to destroy the entire ruling class, and that is beyond even their self-serving reach,” Yuan Shao promised.
“Is it…?” Cao Cao chortled. “How are Cai Yong, and his uncle, Cai Zhi? Do they still rot in prison, or are they cold bones…?”
Yuan Shao was silent. Cao Cao was aware of the fate of the famed Cai Yong, author of the plan to protect the classics from those that wanted to change them; the scholar had repeatedly made his own complaints about the eunuchs, assuming that his place as a librarian and official historian would allow him some concessions, and he had been proved wrong. The eunuchs falsified allegations of corruption and had the man and his uncle Zhi thrown into prison, pending execution.
“They were pardoned,” Yuan Shao said quietly. “They were exiled instead.”
“There you are,” Cao Cao scoffed. “The man has devoted his life to the truth, to protecting the teachings of our ancestors, to recording our greatest achievements and our greatest mistakes, so that perhaps, one day, one glorious, and ever-more preposterous day, the collective people under Heaven might actually learn something and stop making a collective horse’s arse of themselves!”
“He’s alive,” Yuan Shao protested.
“Where…?” Cao Cao chortled. “Where is he ‘alive’…? I am here, existing, for my little statement… where did they send Cai Yong…?”
“…The north, the frontier,” Yuan Shao admitted.

“Aha!” Cao Cao chuckled. “There you are! They have sent him to a place filled with violent barbarians, where our great army has only recently been humbled, so that he can be abducted by the Xianbei, and his works burnt, and his body put to work as a rice picker! He’ll die a peasant’s death, slowly going mad from spending day after day having his magnificent mind cruelly underused, like poor Mister Chen Shi, and his son Ji, whose literary expertise is denied to us as well, and for what…?”
“They will be allowed to return; the scholars pressure His Majesty every day,” Yuan Shao insisted. “All the eunuchs’ scheming ever does is create new threats to themselves… this time in the chosen successor as Empress, Lady Hè, who tolerated His Majesty’s whimsies and-”
Cao Cao shook his head sorrowfully and said, “I was so busy whining that I never did find out what you meant by the Emperor getting worse. Please, elaborate.”
“He is fanciful,” Yuan Shao chuckled. “He enjoys some sort of strange game with his consorts, where he dresses in merchants’ clothes, and they dress as all sorts… even men… and he enacts strange ‘encounters’ with them. As I said, I hear that Lady Hè was been quite happy to suffer the ritual, and now she is the future mother to his son and heir. Her family is not privileged, but she has a brother… a very ambitious brother.”

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