The Shepherd of Wolves

The vast, windswept plains of the northern frontier, once a battleground, had become a sprawling administrative headache. Meng Tian's forward command post, once a spartan camp geared for a swift, surgical hunt, had bloated into a center of governance and relief efforts. The crisp scent of horse and leather had been replaced by the smells of disinfectant, boiling grain, and the ink of a thousand bureaucratic documents. The glorious war against Altan and the subsequent war against the plague were over. The tedious, frustrating, and deeply inglorious work of peace had begun.

Meng Tian sat behind a makeshift desk piled high with ledgers, grain requisitions, and medical reports. He, the great admiral, the Emperor's sword, was mediating a bitter dispute between two Mongol khans over grazing rights. The territory in question was a wide swath of land whose previous owners had been summarily executed by Altan's purging war party.

"The lands of the traitor Chuluun have always bordered mine!" the first khan, a stout man with a belligerent face, argued, slamming a meaty fist on the table. "By the ancient laws of the steppe, it is my right to claim them for my people!"

"Your people are weak herders!" the second khan, a younger, more aggressive man, shot back. "My warriors are strong! We are better suited to hold the land against any future Russian incursion! The land should belong to those who can defend it for the Emperor!"

"The land," Meng Tian said, his voice like the grinding of stones, heavy with a weariness that went far beyond physical fatigue, "belongs to the Emperor. It will be apportioned according to need and loyalty, as judged by my office, not according to who shouts the loudest. You will both return to your camps and await my formal judgment."

The two khans, chastened by his granite authority, bowed stiffly and departed, still glaring at each other. Meng Tian sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling a headache begin to throb behind his eyes. He was a warrior, a master of strategy and tactics, a man who understood the clean, terrible logic of the battlefield. He had been forced into the role of a bureaucrat, a judge, a colonial administrator, and he found it far more exhausting than any campaign he had ever waged.

His chief intelligence officer, a sharp-eyed man seconded from Shen Ke's service, entered the tent. "Admiral," he said with a crisp salute. "Another report on the 'Scourge,' as the locals are now calling Altan. She has executed two more clan leaders near the Khentii Mountains. Her purge is almost complete. By our estimates, she has effectively destroyed Russia's entire intelligence and support network south of the border. They have no significant assets left in the region."

"And in doing so," Meng Tian mused, turning to the large map of the territory, now dotted with the small black flags that marked the locations of Altan's executions, "she has created a dozen new blood feuds, succession crises, and land disputes like the one I just had the pleasure of mediating. She is not a surgeon, precisely cutting out a cancer. She is a wolf, tearing out the throat of the weakest sheep in the herd, leaving the rest of the flock to fight amongst themselves for the scraps."

"The people see her as a hero, sir," the officer offered. "A true Mongol spirit who is cleansing the land of foreign traitors. Her legend grows with every execution."

"They see her as a hero today," Meng Tian countered, his voice grim. "Tomorrow, when they are fighting each other for the land she has so conveniently 'cleansed,' they will be begging for the order and stability that only the Qing can provide. She does not realize it, but every traitor she executes makes our eventual, permanent rule here easier. She is, unintentionally, the most effective tool of colonization we could have possibly asked for."

He looked at the map, at the winding, bloody trail of black flags that marked Altan's path of vengeance. His expression was one of profound, weary irony. He had let her go at the Wolf's Jaw Pass out of a sense of honor, a desire to avoid a massacre of his own men. That single act of mercy had unleashed this. Altan, his worthy adversary, had become a brutal vigilante, and her brutal vigilantism was inadvertently serving the Emperor's long-term strategic goals far more effectively than his own 'honorable' methods ever could. The sheer complexity of the situation, the tangled web of consequences, was a burden.

"I was sent here to heal a plague," he said, more to himself than to his officer. "I have done so. But now I must deal with a different kind of sickness. The political chaos left in the wake of Altan's 'justice.' I am no longer a general fighting a war. I am a shepherd trying to manage a pack of wolves, and the most dangerous wolf of all is the one who thinks she is the shepherd."

Just then, an aide entered with a fresh pile of reports. Another dispute over water rights. A request for judgment in a case of livestock theft between two clans whose leaders had been executed. A plea for grain from a clan left destitute by Altan's purge of their 'traitorous' leadership.

Meng Tian picked up his brush to write another decree. The weight of it felt heavier than his sword ever had. He was no longer hunting a cunning adversary across the plains in a clean contest of wills. He was now a colonial governor, bogged down in the messy, inglorious, and deeply political reality of ruling a conquered, traumatized people. He had won his 'clean' war against the plague, only to be trapped in the dirty, intractable peace that followed—a peace made all the more complicated by the very vigilante he had, in a moment of profound and perhaps foolish honor, allowed to run free. He was learning the Emperor's greatest lesson: conquering a territory is simple, but ruling it is the work of a lifetime.