Chapter 128. Letters to and from the house.

Su Yan’s temporary residence in Pingliang, located near the government office, easy to deal with business. The two boys and Jing Hong chased needless to say, Chu Yuan led the first batch of Jin Yi Wei guards, together with the ones who came from Yan’an Province after recovering from their injuries, a total of ten people, also lived in the front yard of his mansion, acting as a guard.

Most of the later five thousand brocade guards were stationed at the military camps on the outskirts of the city, taking turns on guard duty to ensure that when Su Yan went out, there were always enough men around to protect him.

Such a strong guard can be said to be impenetrable to needles and water, stronger than an iron barrel.

Su Yan sometimes think they worry too much, with so much fanfare? Besides, he is only a seventh-grade inspector general, so the use of the son of God’s own army, said the temporary search for people is still justifiable, after a long time, will inevitably cause the courtiers to criticize.

Tengchongwei Commander Long Quan replied, “Lord Su don’t worry, the emperor explained, don’t need to worry about the courtroom object discussion, everything has its own holy will to decide. Our set of men and horses will not be stationed in Shaanxi for a long time, when the situation is stabilized, the horse political innovation is on the right track, it will be withdrawn to the capital in batches.”

Su Yan nodded and said, “It is only right to retreat, you are after all the upper guards, you must not divide the thinning of the holy guard.”

The pro army on the straight twenty-six guards, including jinyiwei mainly in charge of guards, honor guards, arrest, criminal prison; jinwu, feather forest nineteen guards, in charge of guards; Tengchong four guards, in charge of escort with the driver. Flagman guards palm drums, guards; Prefectural military guards in charge of the young army (i.e., supplemental soldiers).

Jingwu, Feilin and other guards basically solidly guard the Forbidden City. In fact, the emperor used the most smooth, the most mobile, or Jin Yiwei and Tengchun four guards.

Tengchong four guards have more than 40,000 soldiers and horses, by the Imperial Horse Eunuch eunuch command, directly under the orders of the emperor. And Jin Yi Guards in addition to the ceremonial guards for decoration, now there are about six thousand people, most of them are here, the rest of the men and horses, basically in the South and North Zhenfu Si.

Su Yan did not know what to think of, the ghost asked, “Is the North Township Division …… manpower enough in the capital?”

Long Quan was stunned and replied, “It should be enough. After all, they are only in charge of arrests and penal prisons, and there’s nothing that needs to be a big deal.”

Su Yan clasped his hands together and interlocked his palms, his two forefingers unconsciously rubbing together, a small movement of distraction. After a few seconds, he said again, “Did something happen to the Brocade Guards?”

Long Quan was puzzled, “Why did Lord Su ask this question?”

Su Yan said, “After all, I have done the errand of combing the Brocade Guards, and I am somewhat concerned about the follow-up. After Feng De Evil’s ambush, I don’t know how the new master of the seal is in terms of ability and temperament.”

Long Quan’s brain is flexible, and quickly reacted to the fact that Su Imperial Secretary is asking in a playful way why these 5,000 brocade guards will be led by him, the Tengchong Left Guard Commanding General, does the brocade guards not have any chief officials?

He smiled and explained, ”The Emperor has yet to decide on the new Master of the Seal, and the position of Commander of the Brocade Guards is currently hanging in the air. I was also appointed on a temporary basis. Originally, the Imperial Master had appointed another Jinyiwei titular Commanding Envoy, but unfortunately he fell off his horse and broke his leg before he left.”

Su Yan asked offhandedly, “What was that man’s last name?”

“Last name is Sin.”

Su Yan couldn’t help but breathe a sigh of relief.

Shaanxi is thousands of miles away from the capital, the sound and communication is inconvenient, what happens in the capital may not reach his ears in a short time.

Even if the pigeons are flying, they have to arrive at a fixed place with an official dovecote, and there have to be pigeons in the pigeon cage from the capital before they can fly back to the capital according to the original route. It is not possible to fly around casually.

Therefore, without urgent matters, he seldom used flying pigeons.

If you take the “immediate delivery” by post, it is basically limited to official documents and memorials.

Counting the private letters he had received in the past three or four months, excluding the secret orders given by the Emperor, there were only ten, seven of which were gibes from the Crown Prince.

–Shen Qi wrote a total of three private letters to him, none of them were long, but they were obviously pouring out after careful consideration, and even the ink marks on the pen carried a full and cracking flavor.

The head of the first letter was “mother”, was scolded by him when he wrote back, from the second letter, the head was changed to “good brother”. These three words from Shen Qi’s hands, how to see have a kind of twisted feeling, Su Yan always suspect that the other party has a meaning, but can not find the reason for hair made.

The content of the letter also told him that he could not pick faults – the entire text does not have a frivolous word, but every word is related to the feelings; does not directly say that he misses, a piece of heart but through the paper out.

Sometimes it’s parental:

“The grapes you ate at my house and said were sweet are now gradually coming off the market. I wanted to freeze some fresh fruit in the ice cellar, but unfortunately this thing is not resistant to preservation, only to be made into wine. According to the recipe you gave me, three pounds of grapes and one pound of sugar, fermented and bottled, and then stored for another half a year before it can be imported, and you should be back for New Year’s by then.”

Sometimes spilling the beans:

“I’ve done a few beautiful cases, have been promoted from a thousand households to Commander, and then promoted to Tong Zhi. When I was in the East Garden, you said that my thigh was not thick enough and long enough, and that you were afraid that it would be broken. Now I see that it is thicker and longer, but it is not enough. I know that no matter how much further up the ladder I climb, I will always be under people, but at least let me climb higher and higher in order to provide you with more arms.”

Sometimes there are only words:

“The Buddha crosses all beings but refuses to cross me. You can cross me.”

Su Yan put every private letter in the leather bag, Shen Qi one, the prince one, the emperor one. Three leather bags, hidden in the depths of the bag, and carried with him when he went to any state capital.

He writes all sorts of hidden grids for the Emperor, hiding little thoughts of playfulness and sentimentality within the stately zigzags.

He wrote seven letters to the Prince, detailing what he had seen and heard on the way, many interesting things, laughing and joking between the pages.

He gave Shen Qi only one letter back. Just a few days ago, with a title of 31 words, it was a seven-word poem.

–When he was in the elective course in the previous world, writing metrical poems had always been Su Yan’s weak point, mainly because of the headache of the unevenness. After crossing over, the emperor ordered him to compose a poem at the Enrong Banquet, but he was afraid to show his face, so he made a limerick to muddle through.

But now he wants to write a poem. Instead of copying the ancients within five hundred years, or copying the beautiful lines of the Internet in his previous life, he would honestly, rack his brain, write one himself.

Su Yan drank a few mouthfuls of Xiao Bei’s well-warmed cold wine, biting his quill, looking at the frosty maples and cold chrysanthemums in the nursery outside the window, dipping his ink and writing, “Wine-dyed frosty forests are drunk with sunset twilight, and the wind passes through the yellow flowers like curling clouds. Cold love heavy coverlet thin bone tired, brocade word chat inscription more send gentleman–“

When I wrote the last two lines, I felt some boudoir grudges, and unsatisfied, I rubbed the paper ball and threw it away.

After rethinking, he slowly wrote: “This body is especially outside the thousands of mountains, and the soul dreams of the night over the platform. Under the east fence of my hometown, chrysanthemums bloom with wine.”

This song he consciously quite good, not only seems to be committed to the promise, but also not lack of leisure breath, but “chrysanthemums, open” three words look at the buttocks hurt, so the ball of paper rubbed hard, threw away.

Su Yan scratched his forehead hair, sighed with worry, and finally came up with a melodious and euphemistic song. He was afraid that if he deliberated over and over again, his brain cells would die again, so he simply stuffed it directly into an envelope and sent it out.

Shen Qi, who was far away from the capital, received this long-awaited letter, and after opening it, he saw that it was a seven-character poem titled “Some Thoughts” – “The clear light has no intention to enter the sparse curtains, and the gradual gain and loss of the moon strings. When the geese woke up from their dreams, they were searching for Jinsu, and counting the years in the depths of the fallen flowers.”

When he read it, he felt that there seemed to be a vague sense of longing, but also seemed to be just lamenting the passing of years. Shen Qi couldn’t make up his mind, hated that he had read fewer poems, so he transcribed it by hand, and found a general flag who had been a failed scholar and then abandoned the military as a jinyiwei, and asked him to decipher the meaning of the poem.

The chief flag of Xiu Cai looked at it, it was the handwriting of the superior officer, and immediately started to pat his ass. Shen Qi said impatiently: ”I told you to interpret the meaning, who told you to comment? It doesn’t matter whether the poem is well written or not, as long as I think it’s good. I just want you to see whether the person who wrote the poem has that meaning or not.”

“Which means?” Chief Flag asked uncertainly.

Shen Qi glared at him with a grim look, “Which one do you mean by sending a poem all the way here!”

“Oh–” the Chief Banner had an epiphany, and was busy pointing to the paper, “Yes, yes, your honor, please look at the third sentence. The ‘goose’ is a bird of long love, but also a bird of communication, there is ‘the wild goose passes on the book’, and ‘Jinsu’ uses the allusion to ‘fish passes on the ruler’. The allusion to the ‘fish passes on the ruler’ is the meaning of the love letter. This line says that the person who wrote the poem woke up in the middle of the night dreaming of geese, and got up to look for the letters sent by his sweetheart!”

When Shen Qi heard this, he pressed down his heart full of joy, put on a casual look, faintly praised two sentences, and sent this general flag away.

As soon as the man was gone, he pressed the letter paper hard against his chest, using it to suppress the wildly beating heart.

Shen Qi put this letter and the previous one into the brocade bag, put it in his arms during the day and hide it under his pillow at night, and spent days like years speculating about Su Yan’s return date.

And thousands of miles away in Shaanxi, Su Yan got lost in his conversation with Long Quan, remembering all those letters that came and went, and it wasn’t until the other party called him several times that he suddenly came back to his senses and smiled somewhat embarrassedly, “A bit weary, not a lot of energy.”

Long Quan said, “Your Excellency take a good rest, as for the messenger who claimed to be sent by the Yu Wangfu, why don’t we wait until tomorrow to meet again.”

“No matter, bring him to the study. Ask me clearly before I feel solid in my heart.”

–

Inside the study, Su Yan invited the messenger to take a seat, and after sizing him up, asked, “Is the injury going to be serious?”

The messenger shook his head, “Thank you for your concern, Your Excellency, a little flesh wound, not a problem.”

“How did you end up in the hands of the King of Pingliang County and get beaten?”

“I am Prince Yu’s personal guards, ordered to come to deliver a letter to Lord Su. I wanted to squat outside the county king’s mansion and wait for his lordship to come out, but somehow attracted the attention of the guards of the king’s mansion, a dozen of them encircled from behind and swarmed up to put my humble servant in a sack and dragged him into the county king’s mansion.” The messenger looked ashamed, “It was my humble servant who was negligent and careless, thinking that the streets of the Prefecture were safe.”

Su Yan “tsk” a sound, not without mockery said: “Earlier I saw King Yu to participate in the Dragon Boat Festival shooting willow, many escorts, weekdays in the capital to and from, there are also many guards around, how even the messenger are not willing to send a few more people?”

The messenger replied with a straight face: “It’s not that I don’t want to give up, but there’s nothing I can do about it. Since the Emperor issued a ban ten years ago, His Majesty has not been able to cross the boundary monument of the capital city by one step, and even if he sends someone out of the capital, it is still within the scope of the ban. His Majesty sent me alone to come secretly to Shaanxi, already taking a big risk, in case the Emperor knows–“

He paused and added, “Before my humble servant left, the king instructed that he must hand over to Lord Su and ask for a reply letter. If there is no reply letter, I will not want to go back to the capital in my life. But that letter was taken by the Pingliang County King before, I don’t know if Lord Su got it back?”

Take is back, Su Yan did not open to see, afraid of spicy eyes and gas liver pain, almost directly burned a hundred.

With a dark face, he pulled out an envelope and slapped it on the desk, “You send this letter back to him as is, and say I don’t want to read it.”

“How is this possible?” The messenger was very difficult, “My humble servant has returned without any success, and I cannot explain to His Majesty.”

Seeing that Su Yan was unmoved, the messenger got up and walked to him, half-kneeling and pleading with clasped fists, “I beg Mr. Su to take pity on my humble servant’s pain of traveling for several months, and take a look at the letter!”

Su Yan saw his nose and face swollen, forehead wrapped gauze blood stains remain, a pair of eyes swollen into a squint through the light of cutting pleading, heart sympathetic, think how much he hated Yu Wang, but also bad to go to the anger of a hard to send a letter of people. So he said, “I don’t read the letter, but I can write a reply, so that you can take it to the police and avoid being chastised.”

The messenger was grateful.

Su Yan got up, took a piece of ordinary white paper, dipped it into the ink and waved the brush, and without thinking, wrote down four big words with dragons flying.

As he was so full of emotion that he was about to explode, he overplayed his hand, and these four characters seemed to break through the bottleneck of his own clear spirit, but not enough of his old robustness, and spewed out the momentum of a calligrapher’s luanxiangfengshu –

“Throw, you, old, mother!”

After writing and shelving his pen, Su Yan, with a subtle malicious excitement, blew dry the ink stains, folded it into a kraft envelope, and handed it to the messenger: “Here, the letter he wants back.”

The messenger, who dared to ask what he had written, took it and put it solemnly into his bosom.

Su Yan said, “Shaanxi may not be peaceful, I’ll send two brocade guards to escort you back to the capital so that nothing untoward happens halfway.”

The messenger thanked him again and again, and then retired and departed.

Jing Hongchu, who was guarding the outside of the study, saw the door open and walked in. He seemed to have something he wanted to say, but it was a little difficult to speak. Su Yan looked at his look of anger in doubt and fear in anger, didn’t strain himself and laughed: “Do you know what this face of yours looks like?”

Jing Hongchou said very uppity, “My subordinate doesn’t know, please instruct me, my lord.”

Su Yan stifled a laugh, “Like a fearful husband who suspects his wife of cheating and wants to cross-examine but doesn’t dare to do so.”

Jing Hong chased by his bashful cheeks flushed red, offhandedly said: “My subordinate is worried that adults suffer! He said he went in for a secret talk, but when he came out, he changed into new clothes… What exactly did that Pingliang County King do to His Excellency?”

Su Yan really couldn’t help it and laughed, wiping the tears that came out from his laughter while waving his hand, “You should ask what I did to him hahaha …… I guess he wouldn’t dare to come within a foot of me in his life, let alone be alone.”

Only then did Jing Hongchu completely put down his heart, took a few steps forward and got close to his Lord Su. Desktop paper and pen had not yet been packed, he glanced at it and asked, “Your Honor has written back to King Yu?”

Su Yan nodded and said pleasantly, “Guarantee that when he sees the reply letter, his nose will be crooked.”

“King Yu has a bad character, spoiling a good martial art.” Jing Hong chased the corners of his mouth with a hidden icy smile, “When we return to the capital, if that dog king pesters your lord again, I will assassinate him.”