The Morning Market
Cast out and then restored, Lord Mengchang means to punish the five hundred retainers who fled him — until Tan Shizi stops him: the market fills at dawn and empties at dusk, not from love or spite, but because that is where the goods are.
Men leave a bare stall without hating it. Don't mistake the tide for betrayal.
The busiest stall in the row stood empty, and the men who had crowded it all spring were three counters down, crowding someone else.
It had belonged to a grain-factor whose patron in the capital fell first; the bad news had come up the river ahead of him. The same faces that used to laugh at his jokes were laughing at the new man's now, with the same ease.
Dog watched the factor stand at his cold counter, turning a tally no one had brought him. "They ate at his table," the boy said. "Last month. The same men." It was not the leaving that troubled him. It was how light it had been.
"A patron of Qi was cast out once, and his retainers melted away," the Wu said. "When they brought him back he wrote up five hundred names — the ones who left — and meant to kill every one. His man stopped him with the market: it fills at dawn and empties at dusk, not from love or spite, but because that is where the goods are. He scraped the names off the slips."
"So they were never his," Dog said. "Only where the grain was."
"They were his while he was the market." She could have priced every loyalty in the row down to the copper, and she trusted that read entirely. She did not turn it on the boy at her shoulder, the way you do not test a rope you are already hanging from.
The history. From the Zhanguoce. Lord Mengchang, the great patron of Qi, was stripped of office and saw his crowd of retainers desert him overnight; when he was restored, he drew up a list of five hundred names and meant to kill every man who had left. Tan Shizi met him at the border and stopped him with the marketplace: it is full in the morning and empty by evening — not because men love the market at dawn and hate it at dusk, but because what they want is there at dawn and gone by dusk; men go toward wealth and rank and leave poverty and disgrace, and there is nothing personal in it. Mengchang scraped the five hundred names from the slips and never spoke of his grudge again. There is no fixed chengyu here, only the image the strategist leaves — 市朝, the morning market: loyalty is traffic, and it flows to wherever the goods are.
The figure. ䷬ Gathering Together (Cui) · line 1 — Sincere but not to the end—sometimes confusion, sometimes gathering. If you call out, one grasp of the hand from the leader turns away all distress. You waver in decision because you're in a large group and allow yourself to be influenced. Don't be led astray. Attach yourself to the leader.
The reading. Don't mistake the tide for betrayal. The scene gives the proverb a fallen grain-factor and the crowd that drifts off his cold counter onto the next risen man's — read by the Wu as flux, not treachery, the way she has learned to price every loyalty in a market. It lands on the half of her she cannot read cold: the boy, the one loyalty that was never on the tide, and the one she has never tried to price.
Source: Zhanguoce · State of Qi (齊) · Hexagram ䷬ Gathering Together · line 1
Illustrated & divined by Digital Rain Studios.