The Qiang (2)
Splendid Ma Chao.
A Dragon General of legend—descendant of Ma Yuan, founding hero of the Later Han, and one of Shu Han's famed Five Tiger Generals.
A rough tally of the feats he had racked up would read something like this: in both the official histories and the Romance his momentum flagged a little after the Battle of Red Cliffs, and yet he was the Dragon General who once drove Cao Cao, master of the mightiest force under heaven, to within a hair's breadth of death. There was even that famous scene of Cao Cao tearing off his battle robe as he fled on horseback, and later, during Liu Bei's march into Shu, he put his extraordinary strength on full display, dueling Zhang Fei to a perfect draw.
His valor and the fame that had shaken the Central Plains were held in such esteem that later generations, in praising Ma Chao, styled him the Heavenly General of Divine Awe. By Cao Cao's own telling, the sight wrung from him a gasp of admiration—as if Lu Bu had returned from the dead.
And the person behind that legend was...
"Fath—"
"QUIET!!"
Right at this moment, before my very eyes, she stood with both hands clamped to her head, catching hell from her father, Ma Teng.
...Hiiing...
Dressed down under that bark, she looked for all the world like a cute puppy yelping at its master's scolding.
A few days before, she had been placed under house arrest for an accident that lost a large number of horses all at once. But she was at that age where running wild was all she wanted, and in her eagerness not to be caught she had slipped out in plain clothes instead of her usual battle garb—only to be seized as a hostage by a pack of ruffians.
She stuck her lips out in a sulk, as if nursing some complaint, but the look was nothing short of adorable.
Just as the man had been hailed as a beauty even in the Romance, Ma Chao born a woman was a stunning blonde in her own right. True to the name Splendid Ma Chao, her white-gold hair gleamed like woven silk, and her jade-green eyes—refined enough to look almost innocent—seemed to explain all on their own why people called her the finest beauty in Xiliang. Her skin was fair, her figure trim and shapely without an ounce of excess flesh; and her arms, for all the formidable strength in them, showed no trace of brutishness—compressed, lean muscle leaving her delicate in appearance.
But for all those delicate looks, her mouth was filthy. A harsh frontier life, spent fighting ferocious barbarian tribes head-on, had tempered her disposition into something quick to boil and worn a coarse way of speaking into her lips.
At our first meeting I had been utterly bewitched by her looks, but after repeated exposure to her mustang-wild temper and foul mouth, my heart no longer stampeded the way it once had. About the level of a little flutter whenever I caught her smiling, anyway?
Ma Chao as a figure only really shows her brilliance in the middle volumes of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, so most people knew little of her past. I was no exception.
Five years together since that first meeting had taught me she was a first-rate tomboy. She got into trouble constantly, but threw herself into her martial training, and when she did wrong she knew to come forward and apologize first.
Even the day we met, when a slip in her strength control had sent me flying with a single hit, Ma Teng had read her the riot act. My father, seeing me hurt, flew into such a towering rage that he threatened to scrap the entire merger of our forces.
An accident, yes—but I, knocked unconscious by her blow, kept a wary distance from her for a while. Then she came to find me on her own, knelt, and apologized.
"...I'm sorry."
"......"
"I hit you way too hard, didn't I? Honestly, I never thought you'd fly that far... I'm really sorry."
She had meant no harm, it turned out—the moment I collapsed she had rushed me off to a physician. Between those glistening eyes and that genuinely stricken face, my resolve crumbled, and I, who had carried a certain fondness for Ma Chao from the original history, forgave her. The apology was plainly sincere, and kneeling was a humiliation no warrior took lightly. There was no way I could refuse to accept it.
And so, inseparable from the age of ten, she and I spent six years together and became the closest of childhood friends.
It would be a lie to say I was immune to that beautiful face. To put it bluntly, unless you were a water buffalo—or a eunuch—falling for Ma Chao's beauty was only natural. Her one flaw was that, under the pretext of drilling martial arts, she sometimes lost her grip on her strength and used me like a sandbag.
If the era held one peculiarity worth noting, it was this: Ma Chao here had been born some six years earlier than her original-history self, arriving around the year 170—the same as me, my age in other words—and barely a year had passed since her coming-of-age ceremony. In the original history, when the Yellow Turban Rebellion broke out she would have been a moppet not yet ten; here, the rebellion was all but over by the time she came of age and could stand on a battlefield as a general.
There was a time I wondered why on earth she'd been born early, but by now I had stopped caring. I needed a Dragon General a match for a thousand, so it was a blessing—and besides, her being born a woman had already set her a long way apart from history to begin with. The Ma Chao who had come of age wasn't yet at the prime that would one day shave off Cao Cao's beard, but her outstanding martial feats were already the talk of Xiliang. Word had it that even Yan Xing, the man guarding my side, had once crossed blades with her in a private duel—and been floored.
Ma Chao just stared at me in silence, then went on beaming desperate, pleading glances my way, begging to be saved. Unable to ignore those eyes forever, I cleared my throat and spoke.
"...Er, Uncle? Wouldn't it be best to stop there? Ma Chao was only trying to catch those ruffians herself. If anything, this is a deed worthy of a reward. So please, let your anger go."
"Haha!! Wenyue's son, through and through! Very well—I'll do just that!"
"......"
"Ma Chao! Enough—lower your hands, now!!"
"Yes sir!"
At Ma Teng's hearty word, Ma Chao's hands snapped down like a shot.
Stern as he was with his own daughter, the moment I opened my mouth—me, merely the son of his sworn brother—he showed his magnanimous side and pardoned her. If anything, Ma Teng doted on me more than on Ma Chao, treating me no differently from a child of his own blood. Not that I could fault him for it.
Ma Teng—courtesy name Shoucheng.
Ma Teng was descended from Ma Yuan, the Fubo General and founding hero of the Later Han—nobility of the finest line—but his family had settled in Guanxi and intermarried with the Qiang until the Han blood in their veins ran thin, and he had known poverty from the cradle.
Into this picture, I had argued to my father, forcefully, that we should join hands with Ma Teng's clan and pledge allegiance to the court. At the time, my father stood as the leading magnate of Jincheng in Liangzhou—the largest warlord force in the region, if you tallied them all up—yet he possessed not a single general worth a thousand men. The Ma Teng clan, for its part, brimmed with martial talent but was too poor to have any power base to prop it up. Part of it was fatherly affection, but having also watched me improve the lives of the common folk and display real cleverness, he chose to gamble on my word and merged our strength with the Ma Teng clan, who had nothing to their name.
As a result, the Han Sui–Bian Zhang Rebellion that history demanded never broke out, and the forces of Ma Teng's house were folded into ours instead. Strictly speaking, "merger" might be generous—it was closer to recruiting Ma Teng and Ma Chao as our generals...
And with the Han Sui–Bian Zhang Rebellion never happening, the original history's clash with that pig of a man, Dong Zhuo, never occurred either. After all, had that rebellion actually gone ahead, my father would have stood at its head—and with the ringleader's own son in the family, the odds of me ending up in the ground would have climbed right along with it.
As for Dong Zhuo, with the Yellow Turban Rebellion ended only recently, he was probably still holding his post as Grand Administrator of Hedong by now—not yet anywhere near Liangzhou.
My father had been only half-convinced about taking in a penniless house like the Ma Tengs even as he folded them in, but after witnessing their brilliance on the battlefield, he sang the praises of my eye for talent instead.
Ma Teng, perhaps because he had pieced together who I was while hearing the full account of our merger when he swore brotherhood with my father, took to showering me with kindnesses large and small. All I had done was engineer an outcome where everyone won, and yet...
Joined far earlier than the original timeline ever managed, the martial prowess of the Ma Teng house and my father's warlord host made us the strongest military power in Liangzhou. While my father met with General-in-Chief He Jin—an old face from court—to prepare our pledge of allegiance, the rest of us waited in Jincheng Commandery.
"By the way—what did you buy at the market this time?"
Ma Teng, like everyone else, had no notion that I was putting knowledge of the future to work; he simply took me for uncannily bright, and asked with real interest.
"There's something I've been meaning to test."
"And what would that be?"
I drew out wood, beast hide, and a thin strip of iron, and began putting something together.
"Stirrups."
"Stirrups? What for?"
A Liangzhou man through and through, fluent in the ways of cavalry, Ma Teng knew exactly what a stirrup was. The stirrup—a footrest hung beneath the saddle. The nomads of the northern steppes had first developed it, but not until the Three Kingdoms era had passed and the age of the Western Jin arrived did riders hang a pair of stirrups, one to each side, from their saddles. Until then, the Han had made do with a single stirrup mounted on one side, and favored it broadly.
Liangzhou's nature—wide open plains and endless mounted skirmishes—meant nothing trained a fast, mobile cavalry force in short order like stirrups did. Not every Liangzhou native was born a master of the saddle, after all.
There were other benefits besides: riders gained real safety in the saddle, and in battle, the burden of balancing on horseback by thigh muscle alone would ease considerably. Even so, bracing your center against stirrups on both sides would be far more efficient than propping yourself up on a single one—and the strain in your riding posture would lighten, too. Even Ma Chao, whose horsemanship had earned its own reputation, might find plenty to gain. Battlefields bred chaos no one could foresee—even grizzled commanders were thrown from their mounts now and then—so paired stirrups would far outperform anything in use.
Just then—
"Young Master!!"
Yan Xing, who had stepped away a short while before, came sprinting back to me in haste, his face drawn tight with alarm and urgency.
"What is it?"
"My lord has arrived. He's asking urgently for General Ma Teng—and for you as well, Young Master."
So the time had come at last.
Our army might have been a warlord power with a name for itself in Liangzhou, but we were magnates all the same, holding no proper title or fief from the Han court. If we meant to leap beyond barren Liangzhou onto the stage of the realm, a foothold was a must.
Uncle Ma Teng and I set off for my father's residence, following Yan Xing's lead.
"I'm coming too!!"
Ma Chao, who had been drilling alone a little way off, came running at our heels.
I didn't refuse her.