[Day 108] The Last Single Beat
April · The Night of All Losses | About 4 minutes’ read
Guo Jia (郭嘉) passed from this world around the third watch of that night.
Cao Cao (曹操) watched at his side to the last, as Guo Jia’s hand grew cold. From the end of that cooling hand, a final thin breath slipped away. Cao Cao’s eyes rested long upon that hand, as if unwilling to lose its last thread.
The lamp inside the tent had gone out a little earlier. Cao Cao did not light it again. He only waited, long, for Guo Jia’s face to come into view once more within the dark.
When dawn came, Cao Cao stepped out of the tent.
Every banner in the camp had already been lowered halfway. Xun You (荀攸) had given the order without waiting for word. The soldiers took off their armor and changed into plain hemp (麻布). The whole encampment, though no one wept aloud, was already in mourning.
Cao Cao sat down at the central seat of the main tent. More fell than sat. With both hands on his knees he stayed bowed for a long time. Then he lifted his head.
His voice poured outward through the tent walls.
“Aigo, Fengxiao. Aigo, Fengxiao.”
Having called so, Cao Cao bent his head again. Then he called once more. The wind stirred the corner of the tent and passed.
Around noon, Xun Yu (荀彧) stepped quietly into the main tent. He stopped a pace in front of Cao Cao.
“My lord. It is time to move the army.”
For a long while Cao Cao did not answer. Then he slowly lifted his head. His eyes were already red, but within that redness something else had come to rest.
“Wenruo (文若). Today I had a dream I shall long be unable to forget.”
“What dream, my lord?”
“Fengxiao left me the names of two men as he went. Liu Bei (劉備), one name. The other he did not say. Not because he did not know it, but because, so Fengxiao said in the dream, that man has not yet put his own name out into the world.”
Xun Yu was silent for a long while. Then he quietly bowed his head.
“That name, one day, must surely come to stand before you, my lord.”
That evening, Cao Cao pulled his main camp at Yijing (易京) a step back toward Xudu (許都). Guo Jia’s coffin was placed on the foremost cart. On either side of that coffin, Xun Yu and Xun You set their horses, each a step apart.
Cao Cao followed behind. On another day he would have ridden at the head. Today he rode at the rear. With Guo Jia’s coffin going before him, step by step he came down the northern road.
On a ridge halfway down, Cao Cao reined in his horse.
He looked back. The encampment at Yijing was already fading into the evening glow. In one corner of that camp, the place where Guo Jia’s tent had stood now remained as an empty place.
Cao Cao spoke.
“Fengxiao’s seat, until the day this man dies, is a seat that shall not be filled.”
Having said it, he turned his horse’s head south again.
Behind him, the soldiers’ steps continued in an even beat. The rustle of white hemp, the regular ring of hoofbeats, a single cough of Xun You’s mixed in between. Cao Cao heard all these sounds at once. And he knew by ear, before anything else, that one sound among them was already gone — the rustle of paper that Guo Jia had made each evening as he spread open a scroll in the corner of his tent. A place where a sound is absent stays in the ear more clearly than the sound itself.
Before they had fully descended the ridge, Cao Cao quietly gave an order to a soldier. “Leave the site of the tent at Yijing as it is. Do not raise a mound. Do not move the stones. Let the empty place remain, simply, an empty place.” The soldier received the order with hands clasped. The message went back by rider to the camp in the north. At Yijing, from this evening through tomorrow, the site of Guo Jia’s tent was to remain only as emptiness. Above that emptiness, a single northern star would rest long.
The sky held many stars.
Beside the place where the greatest star had passed, another small star, this very night, for the first time, kept its own seat, quietly. That small star still had no name.
Even nameless, the star was already shining.
—
“✒️ A line from your editor — Dr. Yeon Sam-heum
Have you ever stood, not at the head, but at the rear, before the seat of a man of yours who has gone on first? The more a man is used to leading from the front, the more surely there comes, once in a life, a single beat in which he must stand behind and let the one ahead go on. In that moment, another’s name, not one’s own, is hung first upon the sky. Is there, perhaps beside you today, a name you would like to stand behind and see off? An evening to stand at the rear comes, perhaps once in a life. If you do not see that evening for what it is, that name may go on ahead, alone. If you do see it, let yourself, quietly at the rear, offer a bow. No one else need see that bow; the sky will. And a bow seen only by the sky is, strangely, the bow the bower remembers longest. Years later, he will recall the weight of his own forehead in that single motion, and know what he could never have known while looking at the person in front of him. That knowing arrives not in words but in a certain settling of the shoulders, one evening, as he pours a cup of tea for no one.
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