Is He Out of His Mind? (1)
Late at night, Han Yeong and Pang De declined the urging to stay and returned to their quarters.
Fa Zheng, reading as was her nightly habit, found the words of the man she had resolved to serve as lord surfacing unbidden in her mind.
“A hasty decision, perhaps...”
She closed her eyes and let the past drift back for a while.
The Ten Attendants' wholesale selling of offices and ranks had bred corrupt officials in staggering numbers, until they swarmed the realm. Most of the warlords, too, concealed in their hearts a selfish greed and a hunger for power all their own.
Even the father she revered had been no match for the Ten Attendants' tyranny—demoted from his post, and of late driven from office altogether. The moment her father, a minister loyal to the state, was stripped of his rank, she had known it in her bones: this Han dynasty had no future.
An emperor who might as well have been a tyrant, sunk in wine and pleasure while the affairs of state rotted; creatures that were neither man nor woman, lining their private purses and selling offices by the fistful. In the hearts of the court's great ministers the Han existed no longer, and each of them moved only to his own desires and obsessions. The people starved while bandits—the Yellow Turbans chief among them—ran wild in every corner of the realm. Such was the age of chaos.
Had her father passed away, she would have followed Meng Da's counsel and made for Yi Province, one of the few regions left with any stability. It was in the midst of all this that word reached her of Han Sui bringing order to Xiliang, a war-torn land where warlords rose in rebellion one after another—and her interest was stirred.
Han Sui was a warlord who had once raised his banner against the state himself. Yet he had brought peace to a Xiliang left all but a wasteland, and so Fa Zheng had looked into him with genuine curiosity. Then she learned that at the very heart of it all stood Han Sui's son, and her interest quickened into fascination.
That she met Han Yeong—come from Xiliang to Yongzhou in search of talent—was coincidence, but in her heart Fa Zheng believed it was fate. And though she observed him for only a short span, watching his conduct at close hand she found it no different from the deeds she had heard reported of him, and so she resolved to take up his commission. Han Yeong, for his part, had quietly made plain his hope that she would join his staff, and her deliberations did not last long.
That was also why she had stepped forward to persuade her father, Fa Yan, herself. So long as they remained in Fufeng Commandery, within reach of the Ten Attendants' grasp, they might well have lost their lives at those very hands.
And having received a kindness, it is only right to repay it...
Kindness and grudges alike, she repaid in full no matter what it took. That had been the creed Fa Zheng set for herself as a child. Her heart lifting at the thought of following her new lord, she closed the book she had been reading, put out the lamp, and went to her sleep.
The Fa household, their affairs put in order, returned to Wuwei with us. Unlike the journey out to Sili, the road back to Xiliang brought no bandit ambushes. We had hunted down so many of the brigand bands by then that Ma Chao's renown had spread far and wide—things had reached the point where the bandits were the ones fleeing from us.
With the raids gone, Ma Chao, bored stiff, took to challenging Pang De and Yan Xing to sparring matches, and watching her eased the rest of our boredom too. And so, after all the twists and turns, we made it back to Xiliang—only to find that in the short while I had been away, Uncle Ma Teng had grown so gaunt his cheeks had sunk in, and his sturdy frame had wasted to half itself.
“You're so late...”
“...”
Judged by the calendar we were hardly late—if anything, we had returned ahead of schedule—but he looked so drawn and haggard that I couldn't bring myself to say so.
Fa Yan took over governance and administration in place of the worn-down Uncle Ma Teng. He held no rank conferred by the court, but if one insisted on a name for it, he had assumed the duties of a Chief Clerk, assisting the Governor and handling official business. And with Fa Zheng and me at his side to help, the mountain of work that was Wuwei Commandery began, little by little, to shrink. With a civil official devoted wholly to internal affairs, the pace of administration was simply on another level.
Fa Zheng, every inch the genius strategist, also helped reorganize our army's order of battle, which had been built around cavalry alone and was rather scattershot besides. She instituted training in new methods of war and drilled tactics drawing on strategies of every color. And so our army gradually outgrew the Arrowhead Formation—the old way of setting a fierce general at the front and simply crashing forward whenever battle was joined.
Ma Chao and Pang De were formally installed as Commandants, each charged with the defenses and security of her own force.
“Alright, let's move!!”
Ma Chao set her soldiers marching to stamp out the bandit bands—mingled packs of Qiang and Di tribesmen—that had been throwing the commandery's security into disarray.
“Kill them!!”
“Slaughter every last one of them!!”
The tribes were the one thing that never seemed to thin out, no matter how many you killed. They never tired of drifting down from the north to encroach on Wuwei Commandery.
“Chief! Government troops are coming!!”
Doom-doom-doom—!!
The dull thunder of hoofbeats rang out sharp and clear, and alarm flooded the tribesmen's heads.
“I-It's the Splendid Ma Chao!!”
It was Ma Chao's epithet, made utterly famous by her habit of reaping tribesmen wherever she went. Her resplendent platinum-blonde hair made her easy to pick out at a glance, too.
“I am the Splendid Ma Chao!!”
Rescuing the homesteads under assault, Ma Chao whirled her spear across the field and annihilated the enemy at a single stroke. Perhaps because she had seasoned herself in real battles and grown accustomed to leading troops, she was still young in years, yet she no longer seemed to need a whit of worrying over.
While Ma Chao was busy reaping tribesmen, Pang De broke the warhorses and drilled the soldiers with iron rigor, all while keeping the camp's security in hand besides.
“...Uuughh.”
“S-Spare me...”
I was passing the camp on some errand or other when wails rose from within—Pang De's training showed no mercy. Men sat collapsed on the ground, heaving ragged breaths, sweat beading fine across their brows.
“On your feet.”
“Hiiik!!”
But Pang De, crescent blade sweeping, mercilessly hauled the spent soldiers back upright.
...Though every now and then I noticed men who had caught a slap from Pang De, their cheeks dyed red... Probably just my imagination, right?
Making deft use of the improved double stirrups he had devised, Pang De brought the future Xiliang cavalry to maturity at remarkable speed. Xiliang's boundless plains were the ideal ground for training horsemen, and the stirrups lent enormous aid to raising them. She had drifted somewhat at the margins in her early days of service, but by now she seemed to have won the army's complete acceptance.
Yan Xing, ever steadfast, continued to oversee my escort, while the army absorbed from Beigong Boyu's command had all but completed its integration under our banner. My father and Cheng Gongying, with their natural eloquence and boldness of action, kept the Guanxi warlords skillfully in hand, and our influence now reached beyond Jincheng and Wuwei, our grip solidifying as far as Xiping Commandery, where still other warlords held sway.
The Guanxi warlords, who until then had merely watched and weighed, apparently judged the tide beyond resisting: they came over swearing submission to our army. The troops they brought, gathered with the forces absorbed from the rebels, swelled in the end into a great host nearing sixty thousand. Given that the official histories credit Han Sui with a hundred thousand men won by destroying Beigong Boyu and Li Wenhou, the figure was hardly an exaggeration.
The people of our domain no longer shook with hunger and dread; slowly, stability returned. So wholly were we buried in the work that, through rain and through snow, a year's span flowed past like water in a swift current.
“Young Master! Something grave has happened!!”
“...Now what's the crisis?”
A year had passed, and spring arrived in 188 CE, the fifth year of Zhongping. My body had grown further still since my rite of manhood—I could now properly be called a grown man. I was in my quarters seeing to official business as on any other day when Yan Xing came running up in urgent haste.
“What is it—did Ma Chao get into trouble again?”
“No, it is nothing of the sort!!”
“Or have the tribes—the Qiang and the Di among them—massed their strength and appeared from the north?”
“That is not it either!!”
“Then what is it?” I asked, tipping my head.
There remained roughly a year of grace before the upheaval of the Ten Attendants. Of course, before then I meant to send letters to the warlords of the realm and summon them to Luoyang... but at the very least, nothing was due to happen in this season, with spring only just arrived.
“...What on earth has happened?”
“A rebellion!!”
Thud!!
I kicked back from my seat and shot to my feet. The chair, unable to bear the shock, clattered over where it stood.
“A rebellion? Then talk—give me the details!!”
By everything I knew, no rebellion of that scale was supposed to break out at this time, and the news rattled me.
“A madman has appeared, and he has usurped the title of king.”
“A mad—?! A king?!”
From just how large a territory had he dared raise his banner?
“Who is it? Where on earth did he claim a throne?”
“In Fuhan County of Longxi Commandery—a man named Song Jian has proclaimed himself the Pinghan King of Heshou.”
Huh?
Wait.
“...Hold on. Where did you say?”
“Fuhan County, in Longxi Commandery!!”
I drew a map of the continent from the drawer beneath the table and spread it across the desk. Then, finding Fuhan County within the Longxi region, I pointed at it with a finger and asked once more.
“Brother, say it again—where did you say?”
“Fuhan County, Longxi Commandery.”
“...Here? This is nothing more than a county of some ten thousand households.”
“Huh? Now that you mention it...”
Yan Xing, it seemed, had sprinted over on the bare news of a usurped kingship and a rebellion, without once pausing to think it through.
“He's proclaiming himself king over one backwater country village?”
To sketch a rough comparison, it was as though a man in Joseon had seized a single mid-sized county, crowned himself king, established a full apparatus of state, and stocked it with officials. It was a recklessness that could not even stand beside Gongsun Yuan, who in the late Three Kingdoms era boasted real power across the Liaodong Peninsula before styling himself King of Yan. Had the man usurped his title after conquering Longxi Commandery entire rather than a single county, I might at least have felt the gravity of it.
“...”
Hearing Fuhan County dismissed as a rural backwater, Yan Xing recognized his own fuss for what it was and clammed up like an oyster. Into that silence, I offered only a terse verdict on the man called Song Jian who had taken a throne for himself.
I honestly could not decide whether a man who claimed a kingship off a single county ought to be called possessed of nerve to spare, or simply out of his mind.