Homeward (2)
“Guo Si, I’ll assign you forty thousand troops. Can you go and subdue the traitor Cao Cao?”
“Of course, Your Excellency. At best, those remnants couldn’t even cross Hulao Pass before they ran away. Even if they slap gold on themselves and call each other heroes or warlords, they’re still just Luoyang scholars at heart.”
Guo Si. A general from Xiliang and the third-ranked officer in Dong Zhuo’s army. In the original history, he was the second man to seize the hypnotic app called “Emperor” after successfully reorganizing the fractured Xiliang, Bingzhou, and imperial armies following Dong Zhuo’s death. He was a renowned commander who single-handedly blocked the rebellions of Lu Bu, Ma Teng, Han Sui, and the Qiang tribes. Although he died before the Battle of Guandu truly kicked off the Three Kingdoms period and thus received almost no spotlight, it made no sense for a man who had once stood as the third-in-command of Dong Zhuo’s forces—the faction that once held hegemony over the Central Plains—to be incompetent.
Like most generals of this era, he did possess the common flaw of equating command ability with personal martial prowess. Still, that weakness never surfaced while his superior, Dong Zhuo, kept a tight leash on him. To Guo Si, Cao Cao—who had barely managed to claim a single province, failed to win over the local gentry of Yanzhou, and couldn’t even move freely within his own territory—was nothing more than a newborn puppy.
“Please assign me an additional thousand Bingzhou cavalry as well. Before spring arrives, I will return with Cao Cao’s head.”
“Permission granted. And Fengxian, my son. How are your eyes?”
“Yes…”
Lu Bu had one eye wrapped in a black patch. Thanks to the heavenly skill of Physician Zhang, he had barely clung to life. In other words, he had only barely clung to life.
“You must shake off an injury of that level and stand again. Only then are you truly my son.”
“I… apologize, Father.”
“Follow Guo Si and strike Yanzhou.”
“…Understood.”
This was an era that had no concept whatsoever of combat fatigue or the aftereffects of battle shock. To soldiers, war was a romantic space and an honorable battlefield. The belief that losing one’s life to the enemy was simply the fate any man who had joined the army ought to accept dominated everyone’s thinking. Because Lu Bu still retained some of his personal martial strength, he received the minimum amount of human treatment. In most cases, however, defeated generals who showed fear were treated as nothing more than cowards. The man himself was practically going insane with rage, but that was simply how the times were.
“I will definitely… definitely destroy Yanzhou and offer you his head.”
“Good. I look forward to it.”
The winter sea is cold. And dangerous. The Yellow Sea has relatively shallow average depths, but the enormous volume of water poured out by the Yellow River and the Yangtze makes the current swift and the water quite filthy. Naturally, the waves grow fierce. To survive those conditions, flat-bottomed ships were used far more often than sharp-keeled vessels. Of course, the ships used by the merchant friends who sailed all the way to distant Rome looked more like sharp-keeled vessels, but I was hardly a naval officer. There was no way I could distinguish between sailboats, ships of the line, or whatever else existed in this age of sails and oars. I simply categorized them as “big ones,” “big ones that don’t rock much,” and “small, extremely shaky but fast ones.” In truth, knowing this much was enough to get by in daily life without any major problems.
This time, even His Majesty the Emperor had to travel by sea route, so we naturally took the largest merchant vessel in use by the State of Yan. That colossal flat-bottomed ship—which usually carried salt all the way down to the jungle regions south of the Yangtze—now received the honor of this glorious moment. The captain’s face drooped like over-boiled cabbage at losing the chance to use his legal money-duplication bug, but the moment I dangled the bait of waiving his “commission” on the next voyage, his lips stretched ear to ear as he gripped the helm as if nothing had ever happened.
The people aboard numbered roughly a hundred, including myself, the Emperor, several dozen court ladies attending him, ten of my personal guards, and dozens of servants handling miscellaneous tasks. When the sailors were included, nearly two hundred people were on the move, yet the deck was strangely quiet. Upon closer reflection, it wasn’t particularly odd. This was a ship carrying both the Emperor and a Duke. While a verbal slip wouldn’t get anyone’s head chopped off, it could certainly block their path to promotion. The elite court ladies attending the Duke and Emperor were hardly lacking in that kind of awareness.
The deck was quiet. I stared blankly at the horizon, calmly watching for the moment my homeland would come into view.
“Duke Gongsun.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“It seems you truly love your family.”
“Yes. The body’s wounds can be treated by physicians, but only family can heal the wounds of the heart.”
Soldiers who returned from the battlefield mostly came home suffering from military illness—morphine addiction or PTSD. And as human history had proven time and again, most cases of military illness healed naturally once the soldier returned to the embrace of a harmonious family. It was a natural hormonal response and an emotional regulation technique humanity had built up over tens of thousands of years. I had received training on how to manage my inner thoughts, and those methods had proven remarkably effective. By the standards of this era—or even by modern ones—I had married extremely well. Even though Un-i could be a bit prickly, she was a child who understood familial affection. Aside from yesterday’s blackout, the number of times blood had rushed to my head had decreased significantly. The chaotic world was stabilizing at a reasonable pace, so in a few years I would probably be able to look back and say, “That was all in the past.”
The sunlight reflecting off the seawater was dazzling, so I turned my head and met the Emperor’s eyes. He was still looking at me.
“The wind is cold. Let us go inside.”
“Are you not worried that Dong Zhuo will attack your territory? I know nothing of military matters, but it seems dangerous for you—the greatest general in the Central Plains—to leave the fortresses of the plains.”
“War will break out eventually. Dong Zhuo’s power… well, this is a rather crude thing to say, but it only exists because he used Your Majesty as a substitute for stamping his own imperial seal. Now that Your Majesty has left Luoyang, the basis for his authority has vanished. He will surely seek another foundation.”
Since Dong Zhuo’s strategist Li Ru had seen the fortress line of the plains with his own eyes and returned, the first target of any justification-seeking campaign would clearly be the weaker commanderies and counties around us rather than the State of Yan. Our position was to maintain the “balance” of the Central Plains the way Britain once had, and with the capabilities the Yan soldiers had built up so far, preserving that level of balance was entirely possible. The calculations were perfect. Of course, everyone always made what they believed were perfect calculations before a war, so absolute certainty was impossible. Still, this was how my own calculations looked.
When I turned my eyes back to the horizon, the light of a lighthouse was beginning to flicker alongside the full moon.
“Fengxian, how are your eyes?”
“Shut up. It hurts like hell, so just shut your damn mouth.”
Lu Bu, the strongest warrior of Bingzhou, had never possessed a particularly good personality to begin with. Now that his right eye no longer functioned, his temperament had twisted to the point where calling it the worst would not be an exaggeration. Guo Si was clearly his superior, yet Lu Bu looked down on him, using the excuse that he refused to obey any man weaker than himself. Guo Si, who had followed Dong Zhuo since the Xiliang days, found Lu Bu—who could commit insubordination simply because he was the son of his superior and escape proper punishment—extremely irritating.
“Fengxian, which way is the road to Yanzhou?”
“This way.”
Guo Si was a man of Xiliang, and the distance between Xiliang and Yanzhou was roughly the span from the western end of the empire to the eastern end. Naturally, he could not be familiar with the geography of Youzhou and Yanzhou in the northeast of Han. Therefore, the task of guiding the way naturally fell to Lu Bu, who was from the neighboring region. As a general of the empire, Guo Si was not completely ignorant of the four cardinal directions. He knew that the route heading toward Dong Commandery—right in front of Luoyang—seemed strange. However, since Lu Bu, who had lived his entire life in Bingzhou, strongly insisted that this was a shortcut, Guo Si followed for now. Of course, if the path turned out to be a trap, it would provide a perfect excuse to purge Lu Bu under the charge of misleading the army. From Guo Si’s perspective, whether the road was truly a shortcut or not made little difference.
“Fengxian, this isn’t the road to Yanzhou. This leads to the State of Yan.”
“Then do you want these thousand cavalry and forty thousand soldiers to cross the mountains? Or shall we cross the Yellow River? If you don’t want the troops to exhaust themselves and get torn apart by that eunuch bastard, then shut up and follow.”
“…As you say.”
The internal power struggles within Dong Zhuo’s army had already grown extremely severe. It had not reached the level of utter chaos where the army and navy raised separate forces to suppress each other, but that was solely thanks to Dong Zhuo—a giant of the age—doing his utmost to bridge the emotional rifts. It sounded like a bad joke, but before Dong Zhuo had plotted against He Jin, the very work He Jin had been doing was exactly what Dong Zhuo was doing now. The only difference was that He Jin, being a celebrity across the entire Han Empire, had been capable of mediating the emotions of most vested interests—including the Clean Stream faction, the Dirty Stream faction, the eunuchs, and the consort clans—while Dong Zhuo was a man who exhausted himself merely mediating the power struggles within his own army.
“Look, there’s Pingyuan City, the foremost fortress of Yanzhou.”
“What?! Pingyuan City isn’t part of Yanzhou, it’s part of the State of Yan—”
“Charge! Charge! Blood revenge against that dog Gongsun Zan! In the way of the steppe!”
“In the way of the steppe!”
“You crazy bastard!”
It was a fortress without a proper gate. Most of it consisted of hastily built wooden palisades, but the fortresses being constructed in between were proper stone structures. Attacking with only a thousand men would be difficult, and even if Guo Si’s forty thousand soldiers joined them, the walls would not crumble on their own. It was a battle with no chance of victory. And if the State of Yan and Dong Zhuo’s army clashed here, problems would arise. War would break out, and his lord Dong Zhuo’s grand strategy would be negated from its very foundation. The worthless Yuan clan dogs lurking in the south of the Central Plains would once again sell their name to gather warlords, and the fragile peace of this era—stacked precariously like eggs—would be mercilessly shattered.
“Fuck, shoot that bastard Lu Bu! If we go to war with Yan right now, only Yuan Shu benefits! I’ll take responsibility, so just shoot!”
“Yes!”
A rain of arrows split the sky. Whether the heavens helped them or had abandoned them, the wind blew from behind their backs.