Retribution (3)
"Thank you all for your hard work."
Our army had taken casualties, yes, but we had shattered Song Jian's forces without any grievous loss — and succeeded in taking his head.
I summoned the generals who had earned distinction in the subjugation of Song Jian's army and held a feast in their honor.
"Not at all, my lord. It was the strategist's brilliant scheme that won the day. The operation was truly masterful."
"Hehe, quite right. For one so young, she is a match for the famed strategists of old."
The warlord-born officers who had once written her off as a mere girl, underestimating her at every turn, now vied with one another to praise her insight and judgment.
"You honor me too much."
Fa Zheng, far from presuming upon the compliments, bowed her head in modest gratitude.
Well, that's a surprise. I'd assumed she'd tuck every one of those slights away and settle the score someday.
"Then, generals, you have earned your rest. We will see to the aftermath."
"Yes. Understood."
"We shall take our leave, then."
Ma Wan and Cheng Yin withdrew, leaving only me, Pang De, and Fa Zheng in the tent.
Ma Chao and Yan Xing were away for the moment — they had escorted the prisoners back to camp and gone on to accept the surrender of those still holding out in Fuhan County.
"So — what of him?"
"He is here, my lord."
Pang De set down two wooden boxes.
One held the head of Song Jian, the traitor who had dared style himself a king. The other...
...held the head of Wang Guo — the man who had surrendered to us.
"He was surprisingly simple-minded. To think he truly believed we would let him off, even after committing the capital crime of murdering an official appointed by the court..."
"And is that not precisely why the plan worked?"
To Pang De's skeptical remark, Fa Zheng replied in a voice stripped of all feeling.
"Not that I ever had any intention of forgiving a criminal who murdered an official of Han and ran."
Wang Guo.
In the original history, this man — a warlord by origin — had murdered Han officials, then been won over by Han Sui's honeyed words and acclaimed as leader in Beigong Boyu's stead. But after he suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of the government army under Huangfu Song, Han Sui pinned the blame for the losses on him through maneuvering within the rebel ranks, and Wang Guo lost his head for it.
In modern terms, he had been a figurehead — the name on the door, with none of the real power.
Read only as a line about a man purged, his end might seem almost pitiable. But this was, beyond any doubt, the ringleader of a rebellion in command of his own warband — one of the Liangzhou rebels who had done his share to torment the people of the province.
How a man like that ended up under Song Jian, of all people, I couldn't say...
Fa Zheng had come to me demanding a war chest, and the instrument she chose to spend it on was Wang Guo. What she drew from her sleeve was the art of inducement.
For the past week we had fought a deliberately passive action, feigning that we were being hard-pressed by the enemy's offensives.
The enemy, after all, never came down from their mountain, and so they had no way of knowing whether we were fighting in earnest or merely going through the motions.
Then, three days after the battle opened, Fa Zheng set out with Pang De as her escort and a white flag raised high, to seek out Wang Guo, who commanded the enemy's right wing.
Carrying the war chest I had brought along against every unforeseen contingency, she walked straight into Wang Guo's camp.
At first he was wary of her as an enemy — but when she sang the praises of his valor and his fierce fighting and pressed the gold into his hands, he accepted it with open arms and settled in to hear her out.
Faced with a beauty's flattery, even the stoutest defense was bound to crumble.
After all, the very fact that he had swallowed Han Sui's proposal whole, without a flicker of suspicion, in the original history was proof enough of how easily swayed he was.
Fa Zheng knew nothing of this, yet she had judged that a warlord-born man like Wang Guo would feel no deep loyalty toward Song Jian.
Take, for instance, Ma Wan and Cheng Yin — the warlord-born generals who had joined our own army.
Those two alone, men who had once led warbands of their own and were proud accordingly, had grumbled openly after joining that their ranks were lower than Pang De's or Fa Zheng's.
And so she had let us fight passively for three days by design, then gone to Wang Guo with lavish praise for his valor, wealth in hand, and a whispered temptation: betray Song Jian, and his crimes would be pardoned — an official post into the bargain.
To put it bluntly, if we had thrown ourselves into a full assault and accepted the cost in blood, they could not have withstood it. They would have been annihilated.
Short of being fools, they knew it.
As for Wang Guo, it was less that he wished to serve under Song Jian than that, a criminal on the run with nowhere left to go, he had needed someone to lean on.
With Liangzhou — lately a masterless free-for-all — fallen into the hands of us, who had submitted to the Han, his own safety had come first, and so he had hidden himself here.
In short, the man prized his own neck above any grand ambition.
That was why he agonized only briefly over our proposal before accepting it in the end.
With a pardon for his murder of an official and an official post promised besides, he accepted without a moment's torment over any loyalty owed to Song Jian.
Fa Zheng then put her newly won pawn to work, staging several more defeats, and pulled strings from behind the scenes to see that a banquet was held with wine flowing freely.
Just as she had foreseen, Song Jian — flush with his unbroken string of victories — threw a feast to loosen his officers' nerves and commend their merits, and we, guided by the defected Wang Guo, fell upon the enemy camp.
Drunk as he was, Song Jian had known nothing. He had stumbled about in search of an escape route, and died at the hands of the very subordinate he trusted most.
"When did you kill this one?"
"I dealt with him earlier, my lord."
Pang De answered in a perfectly level tone.
"Good work."
"Wang Guo's death will be closed out as an officer under Song Jian turning his blade upon him and taking his head."
Fa Zheng had even scripted the circumstances of Wang Guo's death, braced against any rumor that we failed to keep our promises.
The reason we killed a man who had aided our victory was a simple one.
Because there was no reason to let him live.
Spared, he would have held office while preying on the common folk at every opportunity — an unstable element who might well change his colors and scurry to some other banner the moment our fortunes soured.
We could hardly beg the Han court to pardon such a man — not when our own standing was only just beginning to find its footing.
My expression, as I looked upon Wang Guo's severed head, was pure indifference.
Whatever sensibility I had carried from my life as a modern man had long since gone dull, worn away over the years since childhood.
When I could barely shield the people inside my own walls, grieving for a dead enemy was a luxury.
Worse, it would only have looked like hypocrisy.
"My lord?"
"...Ah — right. Bring in the prisoners, would you?"
"At once."
The moment Pang De stepped out of the command tent, Fa Zheng asked, her gaze clouded with worry.
"Are you well, my lord?"
"I'm fine. I was merely thinking of something else."
I had needlessly burdened her with worry over idle thoughts.
"And what about you — are you all right? You haven't rested properly once since you joined this army."
"I am quite well. I consider this work my calling."
Lies.
In the history I knew, Fa Zheng had spent her brilliant stratagems and keen intellect in Liu Bei's service — and then left the world at the young age of forty-four.
Perhaps an illness born of overwork.
I sent her healthful medicinal herbs from time to time, mindful of her condition, but unless the root of her exhaustion was addressed, such gestures were nothing more than stopgaps.
I found myself wanting to recruit more talent — the sooner the better — if only to lighten the burden on Fa Zheng's shoulders.
"I have brought them, my lord."
Just then, Pang De dragged in Song Jian's followers, bound hand and foot.
By all accounts, the fellow at the front — dressed in rather resplendent finery — was the man's "Chancellor." Certainly the clothes looked expensive; there was no shortage of outward polish.
"So you're the one who served under the traitor Song Jian?"
"Y-yes, that is..."
I had no wish to call him Chancellor, so I simply called him "fellow" — and he answered, terror-stricken from head to toe.
"Why did you abduct the people of a territory under our jurisdiction? Did our submission to the Han make us look like easy prey?"
"N-no, my lord!! We would never—"
"Then explain why you carried off our innocent people and made them subjects of Fuhan County!!"
Handing land to rootless wanderers with nowhere to live and taking them in as one's own subjects was one thing. But snatching people who were living well under another's rule — that was as good as declaring we looked like easy pickings, and an invitation to settle it face to face.
Building population and plundering supplies were the ordinary machinery of war — the means by which economic and military resources were secured.
But I could not accept a petty county ruler and self-proclaimed king doing such a thing to a man who governed two commanderies.
"Th-that is..."
Watching Song Jian's minister hesitate, tongue-tied, I decided to help him find his voice.
"Pang De."
Crack!!
"Gwaaagh!!"
Pang De reversed her grip on the crescent blade and smashed its haft across the man's head, and he reeled in visible agony.
"Was this truly the will of that madman who dared call himself king? Answer me."
Had Song Jian pulled such a stunt in the original history, the neighboring warlords would have crushed him long before.
He had played at being king for decades only because he never harmed the powers around him — so why, of all things, had he provoked us, who had been minding our own business?
Suspecting there was more beneath the surface, I had taken prisoners — everyone but Song Jian himself, the arch-traitor.
The minister, cowed by Pang De's blow, began to speak at last, drowning in fear.
"A-a month ago, an envoy came to see us."
"An envoy?"
"Yes. The envoy said that if we abducted the people of Jincheng Commandery and made them our own subjects, they would turn a blind eye to our founding a kingdom — and even send aid. And that should an army march against us, we were to inform them without fail."
They would look the other way? And report if an army came marching?
At those words, I asked after the envoy's identity.
"Who was this envoy who made such an offer?"
And the name that left his lips belonged to someone I had never expected.
"I do not know who the envoy was... but she said the one she served was Dong Zhuo, General of the Household of Han."
"Dong Zhuo?!"
...What the hell? Why is that bastard showing up now?
I could not hide my shock at the intervention of a figure I had never once seen coming.