The Drinking Party (1)
After straightening his robes, the Emperor was dressed in the imperial garments—though the original dragon robe could not be found, one dyed with purple dye procured from afar had been prepared. Purple had been the color officially recognized as imperial by the First Emperor of Qin, so it was not unsuitable for the Emperor’s dignity. According to the merchants, it was the very fabric used to make the Emperor’s robes in that distant western land called the Great Qin. Clearly, it was no lowly garment to clothe our young Emperor with… or rather, it was Tyrian purple, the dye that had symbolized imperial authority in the Roman Empire. The thought crossed my mind—how on earth had they obtained this?—but considering these men were merchants, pirates, wandering storytellers, and battle-hardened veterans who had sailed west for years, it was not entirely impossible to acquire.
The highest seat was occupied by the Emperor. With no regent present, the seat below remained empty. My place was directly beneath the dais. Thanks to having shed much of my muscle, the formalities were far easier to perform. I prostrated myself, rose at the Emperor’s command, and finished preparing to receive the visitor.
“Your Majesty, I shall bid him enter.”
“Do so.”
The etiquette was not perfect, but no one seemed to mind. I nodded to my subordinates, and the reception hall doors soon opened.
“Hey, Gongsun… Zan… Your… Your Majesty?!”
As the doors opened, Cao Cao walked in with a cheerful expression, only to freeze upon seeing the Emperor seated in the highest place. His face and posture looked exactly like those internet captions from my past life that read “An identity he never could have imagined!”
“It is good to see you. This is the first time I have seen your face, yet you seem to recognize mine. How is that?”
“Ah, er, how… No, I mean… Ahem… My apologies, Your Majesty. When Your Majesty was still a prince, I had the honor of seeing your countenance while serving as Colonel of the Northern Gates.”
After glancing back and forth between me and the Emperor and quickly grasping the difference in our positions—one seated on the dais, the other standing below—Cao Cao immediately prostrated himself in flawless obeisance. His bow was impeccable, far more refined than my own, which I had only half-learned from my teacher. Imperial etiquette was designed to be deliberately cumbersome in order to display authority, so even someone of Cao Cao’s small frame would find it quite uncomfortable, yet not a trace of discomfort showed on his face or in his voice.
“You must be weary from your long journey. I hear you are friends with the Duke of Yan. Enjoy yourself before you return.”
“Y-Your Majesty… Might I ask one question?”
“Speak.”
“There were rumors that Your Majesty had ascended to heaven… Were they false?”
“Ascended to heaven… That tale, you may hear directly from Duke Gongsun. It will be more than you imagine, no matter what you think.”
The Emperor wore a faint smile. Well… that day’s experience had been quite thrilling. Once silk prices dropped a little, turning it into a tourist attraction might not be a bad idea. Using the hot air balloons for reconnaissance was fine, but the real problem was always the cost. Balloons were consumables, they devoured vast quantities of silk that was not produced in Yan, and the Yan army was already an elite force that required enormous funds. If we deployed balloons, we would need at least one per regiment, and the envelopes would have to be replaced every couple of months. Even I did not have that kind of money. Unless Yan could mass-produce silk someday, it would remain nothing but a waste.
Cao Cao shot me a complicated look. I merely smiled lightly and brushed it off.
“I am tired. You may withdraw.”
“Yes, Your Majesty. Long live Your Majesty, long live, long live ten thousand years.”
After performing the proper rites, Cao Cao left the audience chamber. The moment the doors closed, he unleashed a torrent of questions at me.
“Hey, Gongsun Zan. What the hell happened? What did you do to bring His Majesty all the way here from Luoyang? Wait… did you fly through the sky? Can you actually fly? Did you use some kind of sorcery? Or is it some technique I don’t know about?”
“Ask one at a time. Answering isn’t difficult, but… actually, it might be.”
Given Cao Cao’s personality as I had come to know it, he was not the sort of man who would casually manipulate our young Emperor. Still, a person’s true nature could not be fully understood after sharing a few cups of wine, and whether this proto-Stalin of a man harbored any treacherous thoughts deep in his heart remained an unknown.
“Gongsun Zan, let me ask you one thing.”
“Hm?”
“Are you planning to hold the Son of Heaven hostage and wield him as you please?”
“Me? Why would I bother?”
“…Right. That was a stupid question. You have no intention of unifying the realm and restoring a single imperial house?”
“Unifying the realm? Anyone listening would think the Han had already splintered into the Spring and Autumn period… Let’s just call it restoring the state to normal. It sounds better.”
It was true that I had served as a low-level clerk and held administrative posts, but those roles had amounted to little more than secretarial drudgery. Combining my past and present lives, the closest I had come to actual governance was building basic infrastructure in a ruined country, and the closest I had come to politics was behind-the-scenes maneuvering to tank wartime morale. I lacked the ability to properly administer a region with millions of people, and the best way to handle what I could not do was to leave it to professionals. I had entrusted the governance of You Province to Lord Liu Yu’s son and Ji Province to Guo Yi, a loyal retainer of the former governor Han Fu. Of course, I still kept a few small parcels of land under my direct control, but compared to the authority of the Duke of Yan, my personal domain was little more than a speck. Anything larger exceeded my administrative capacity, and I was no pervert who got excited just by coloring maps.
The warlords and powerful clans were springing up like bamboo shoots after rain, but in the end they were still officials of the Han Dynasty. Suppressing them felt far closer to restoring the state to normal than to unifying the realm, and that was exactly the mindset with which I approached this matter.
“Besides, I’m not fond of anything involving politics or governance… Ah, while we’re on the subject, you should stay close to His Majesty and help him with his judgments. You’re rather good at that sort of thing.”
Cao Cao was the grandson of the great eunuch Cao Teng. Since eunuchs could not have children, he had been adopted, but even his adoptive father had risen to the rank of one of the Three Excellencies, whose duty included educating the Emperor or Crown Prince. After the Yellow Turban Rebellion, the Ten Eunuchs’ uprising, and the Partisan Prohibition, our young Emperor had never received a proper political education, and I myself knew next to nothing about politics. There were a few researchers in Liaodong who understood politics, but none of them seemed more knowledgeable than the stocky man standing before me.
“…What makes you trust me?”
“Well… my strength?”
Moreover, Cao Cao’s base in Yanzhou was close enough to reach by tripping over one’s nose. It was not a large territory, and if saltpeter began flowing from the saltpeter fields we were building one by one, it could be flattened in an instant.
“You lunatic, is that something you say to a friend?”
“You’re thinking of what that bastard Yuan Shao did when you thought he was your friend, aren’t you?”
“…I’ve got nothing to say to that. Fine, I understand. I understand, but we haven’t seen each other in ages. Let’s have a drink and talk.”
Cao Cao spoke while tapping the wine barrels piled high on his cart. Wine was always the right answer. We sat down on the bare earth, opened the barrels, and began sharing cups with dried fruit and tofu soup as snacks.
---
Cao Cao could not understand the man named Gongsun Zan. Why had he set up a drinking party in broad daylight right in the middle of the fortress? Why did his subordinates not find it strange? And why were off-duty soldiers coming without hesitation to drink with His Excellency the Duke? None of it made sense.
Cao Cao himself was the type to approach close friends without reserve, but Gongsun Zan treated his subordinates almost like neighborhood younger brothers. Common sense dictated that without displaying authority, one could not earn loyalty, yet the soldiers of Yan were famous for their deep loyalty. This, too, defied reason.
Furthermore, Gongsun Zan seemed to have no territorial ambitions at all; he had distributed most of his lands to his subordinates, leaving him with only a few small counties attached to Liaodong. Yet somehow he managed to equip tens of thousands of soldiers with solid iron armor—where was all that gold coming from? Just like Liu Yan of Yizhou, he was content to mind his own territory and paid little attention to outside affairs, but if anyone threatened his people, he possessed the decisiveness to uproot the threat completely.
‘Well… he single-handedly accomplished what the anti-Dong Zhuo coalition could not, took Zhang Jue’s head with only a few hundred guards, and utterly crushed Ji Province when it tried to exploit the Prince of Bohai. He is an unmatched, undefeated commander. Authority naturally accrues to him even without him asserting it.’
A wry chuckle escaped him.
“Something on your mind?”
“No, it’s just… your situation is rather amusing. All the heroes of the realm gathered and still could not cross Hulao Pass, yet you alone rescued His Majesty. It makes one think that Gongsun Zan alone is worth more than every hero in the land.”
“Heroes, huh… That’s an interesting thing to say.”
It was the same bitter smile he sometimes wore when looking at new recruits back in his days as a colonel. By now, several barrels of wine had been emptied between them, and the fruit and soup brought as snacks were long gone. Their faces had been flushed red for quite some time, and even Gongsun Zan appeared considerably drunk. Cao Cao had attended many drinking parties in Luoyang, but this was the first time he had seen Gongsun Zan this intoxicated.
As the cups passed, so did the conversation. Cao Cao caught a glimpse of the Gongsun Zan who still held loyalty to the Han, while Gongsun Zan caught a glimpse of the Cao Cao who harbored no grand ambitions to dominate the realm. It was not yet certainty, but at least they had reached the point where they could believe neither would draw a sword against the other anytime soon.
“Come to think of it, you never liked being called a hero. May I ask why?”
“Hmm… Would answering with a question be acceptable?”
“Isn’t that also a question?”
“Fair enough… Hmm… Cao Cao, doesn’t it strike you as rather hypocritical to call someone a hero when that person has killed his own people?”
“Are you referring to the Yellow Turban Rebellion?”
“That, and a few other things combined.”
“…Still, if it was necessary to preserve the Han Dynasty, it could not be helped.”
“Could not be helped… Was that truly the case? Was there really no other way besides slaughtering the Yellow Turbans?”
“What exactly are you trying to say?”
“After staining your hands with the blood of your own people, how can you have the audacity to call yourself a hero?”
“If it is for the sake of the state, one must be prepared to shed blood. You have a softer side than I expected.”
“So, what did it feel like to become a hero?”
The cup that had been moving by habit suddenly stopped.
“Did it feel joyful? Glorious? When the people whom the previous Emperor had starved for the sake of lining his own pockets finally rose up because they could endure no more, did it feel refreshing to slaughter them all?”
“You’re quite drunk.”
“Have you ever looked in a mirror? Does the face stained with the blood of tens of thousands still look pale? Do the eyes that starved hundreds of thousands of children to death still look clear and bright? Does the nose that has smelled the stench of blood and rotting flesh still look straight? Does the mouth of the monster who sent his subordinates to their deaths for the sake of a cause still smile?”
Instead of the cup, he lifted the barrel and gulped down the wine inside.
“People can move forward without resorting to the madness of war. I just can’t understand why that simple truth is so hard for everyone to grasp. What the hell is that damned patriotism anyway…”
If one of his own subordinates had said such things, he would have dismissed it as the nonsense of a weakling. But the man before him was the Han’s strongest general, the shield that protected the north, and the savior of the Emperor. Every word carried a different weight.
“Cao Cao, you’ll become like me soon enough. I used to delude myself into thinking I was a hero too… Well, maybe I really was one. After all, I won my wars.”
Gongsun Zan tilted the barrel, but only a few pitiful drops fell from the now-empty vessel.
“Honestly, unifying the realm isn’t that difficult. Not at all.”
“You sound confident.”
“Do you think I couldn’t have taken Dong Zhuo’s head? I simply chose not to. As long as a common enemy remains alive, the country won’t be torn into hundreds of pieces and turned into a battlefield. Killing people is what I do for a living. If I set my mind to it, I could easily tear apart every able-bodied man in the Central Plains larger than a wagon wheel. It would be more than enough.”
“…”
“I could take Dong Zhuo’s head, Yuan Shu’s head, capture and kill Liu Yan of Yizhou, drag down Lu Kang of Yang Province, and as for Tao Qian of Xuzhou? That old man would probably die of fright the moment I got close. As for Gong Rong of Qing Province, if I simply block the sea routes, he would wither away on his own. Do I look like the kind of man who couldn’t do those things?”
“Then the entire realm would unite to stop you.”
“Exactly. Hundreds of thousands of so-called ‘heroes’ would die meaningless deaths. So if I unified the realm, would guarding the tombs of men who died long ago really be worth that price? Is that what that damned patriotism demands? Or should I march west just to gain a few more measly plots of land? If I circled the globe and painted the entire map in Han colors, would those already-rotted bastards applaud me?”
Gongsun Zan stared at Cao Cao with bloodshot eyes.
“The character for ‘person’ (人) was created by likening two people leaning on each other. Add the space between people (間) and you get ‘human’ (人間). Humans are human because they possess the heart to care for one another. Killing people for the sake of some formless thing called a state… no matter how I think about it, that is not something a human should do. Not at all.”
Having said that much, Gongsun Zan could no longer withstand the intoxication and collapsed on the spot. A soldier who had come hoping for a few free drinks sighed, hoisted the fallen Duke of Yan onto his back, and carried him toward the barracks.