Dong Zhuo (2)
Jixian, the seat of Tianshui Commandery.
"Hahahah!! The permission has finally come down."
A man of massive girth and ponderous bulk broke into a villainous grin.
Dong Zhuo, courtesy name Zhongying — Governor of Liangzhou.
The man history would remember as the Great Evil — the very byword for treachery.
In his brutish hands he clutched a secret letter, covertly exchanged with the Ten Eunuchs — the cabal that manipulated the young Emperor from behind the scenes as his illness deepened, shaking the realm to its foundations.
"Eliminate Han Sui and Ma Teng, who have become He Jin's puppets, and help us pin the crime of treason upon them — then the lands they governed shall be granted to you as your fief, and your office raised besides."
"...You Xiliang bastards. Now I have my justification to strike you down, so wait just a little longer."
Dong Zhuo crushed the letter in his fist through sheer brute strength.
During the Yellow Turban Rebellion, he had led an army in place of General of the Household Lu Zhi — only to be defeated and stripped of his post. The fortune he had amassed by squeezing his people dry, he had then poured out as bribes to the Ten Eunuchs.
Thanks to that, he had barely clawed his way back to an official post in Longxi, but the money squandered on those bribes had left his military strength much diminished.
He had since wrung the lifeblood from the local magnates and commoners far harder than ever before to rebuild his war machine, yet unsettling factors still barred his path into the central plains.
One of them was Han Sui, who had seized a swath of Liangzhou and reigned as a rising power. Word had just arrived that his influence was spreading as far as Xiping Commandery.
Had they been mere rebels with hardly any influence, fighting out of greed alone, it would have been no concern — but Dong Zhuo was not so foolish as to leave at his back a force capable of putting a knife there.
"My lord!!"
Just then, Li Ru — a man with a cunning cast of face framed by a catfish mustache — hurried to the seated Dong Zhuo's side.
"Oh, Li Ru! It has come to pass just as you said!! You are truly my bag of tricks!!"
Li Ru, courtesy name Wenyu — Dong Zhuo's son-in-law.
A strategist of brilliant mind, and the man who, when a madman named Song Jian usurped the title of king, had spun the scheme of using him to manufacture a justification for striking Han Sui.
He had sent an envoy to Song Jian with orders to abduct the people of Jincheng Commandery as a military provocation, dragging Han Sui's army toward Fuhan County — and threatened that if the man disobeyed, Fuhan would be smashed to pieces and its people put to the sword.
Song Jian had accepted, declaring that a king could not afford to forfeit his dignity — but terror had evidently taken root within, for his arms and legs, it was said, trembled without pause.
Furthermore, the messenger Han Sui had sent to request cooperation in punishing the traitors was likewise slaughtered — by troops Li Ru had disguised as bandits.
After having soldiers dressed as a bandit horde massacre the people of Longxi Commandery, they had pinned the atrocity upon Han Sui's forces, which had been on the march to strike the traitors down.
Powerful as a provincial official's authority might be, with the central court still standing it was doubtful such a ruse would hold — yet Liangzhou itself was a land where rebellion had erupted time and again, and the court's reach scarcely extended that far.
On top of that, the Emperor lay critically ill and the Imperial Seal rested in the Ten Eunuchs' keeping — and one among them, nursing a grudge over Fa Yan's being carried off to safety, chose to turn a blind eye.
For men luxuriating in wealth and glory in Luoyang, provincial officials were no invading barbarians — whatever they did with Xiliang was no concern of theirs.
It was proof enough that while the Ten Eunuchs excelled at gripping the reins of power, their administrative competence was wretchedly lacking.
"Thanks to you, I have my justification to strike Han Sui — and as a man of the Turbid Stream, I can now reach out to the Ten Eunuchs as well."
"That is but a fraction of my service, my lord... but my lord, word comes that the traitor has already fallen."
"...He fell that quickly? If I recall, you boasted he would hold out for a good month at the very least?"
Fuhan County was a rural backwater with no economic worth, but its rugged terrain made mounting an offensive there a bitter undertaking.
A fortress gifted by heaven itself.
In such a place, cavalry who boasted peerless valor on open ground would find their strength sorely blunted by mountain warfare — or so he had judged, expecting that dealing with Song Jian would take a considerable stretch of time.
And yet it had been barely two weeks — not even half the promised month.
"I thought the same, but it appears the matter was settled in a single week. He is said to be consolidating his army even now and returning to Xiliang."
"Tsk. A pity. By the time we lead our army to Jincheng, the forces from Fuhan will already have joined them... Unless — could those traitors have uncovered our hand in this?"
"Even if they did, we need only brazen it out. Did we not leave behind not so much as a shred of hard evidence?"
No correspondence that could serve as evidence had ever been sent; only a single civil official, gifted with a silver tongue and sharp wits, had gone as envoy.
"It matters little either way. Look at this. The approval has already come down."
A secret order passed through the Ten Eunuchs: the execution of Han Sui and Ma Teng, who had defected to He Jin's side.
The inside story of the Ten Eunuchs' enmity toward Han Sui went as follows.
It began two years earlier, when Fa Yan — one of the right hands serving Wang Yun, Minister over the Masses of Han, and a figure of the Clear Stream faction — stood before the Emperor, pouring out righteous remonstrance and denouncing the Ten Eunuchs.
Resolved to be rid of the thorn in their side, the eunuchs — brandishing the Emperor's authority — within barely a year not only demoted him from clerk of the Minister over the Masses to Left Supervisor of the Commandant of Justice, but succeeded in having the capable, celebrated official dismissed outright.
Seizing the moment, they instructed the bandits of the vicinity to seize Fa Yan as he journeyed toward his homeland and hold him fast, that they might do away with him.
That bandit was Song Yang, who had fled to Yongzhou from the rebel forces crushed by the armies of Han Sui and Ma Teng.
But Song Yang, orders or no orders, was cut down by Han Yeong's company and Fa Zheng, who had chanced to be out scouting for talent — and the whole Fa clan, Fa Yan included, was carried off to their own territory, beyond the reach of the court's power.
The men of Xiliang, who had never held deep ties to the Han bureaucracy, thus gained a weighty connection in Fa Yan — once of the Clear Stream faction, once the pillar at the Minister over the Masses' side.
Frontier folk, as a rule, were held in contempt by the people of the central plains — Sili Province above all.
Yet thanks to Fa Yan, son of the long-renowned Master Xuande, Fa Zhen, they had slowly begun to gather support and popular esteem among the people of the heartland.
Through Fa Yan's connections, links had even formed to He Jin and Wang Yun themselves.
It was, quite literally, wings upon a tiger.
The clash with He Jin and the Clear Stream faction inside Luoyang was already accelerating. Judging it a grave threat should the provincial officials of Liangzhou lend He Jin their strength at such a juncture, the Ten Eunuchs devised countermeasures.
And as luck would have it, Dong Zhuo — who had botched things spectacularly during the Yellow Turban Rebellion — came calling with bribes, seeking reinstatement.
Remembering that he hailed from Longxi Commandery in Liangzhou, they accepted his bribe, restored him to office, and set him to keep Han Sui and Ma Teng in check.
Dong Zhuo, for his part, who had accepted the Ten Eunuchs' proposal, was no fonder of Han Sui and Ma Teng than they were.
"If those bastards hadn't crushed the rebellion themselves, I would have led the army in person, annihilated the rebels, and carved my name in merit...!!"
The rebellion raised by Beigong Boyu.
Had he been the one to lead the army and put it down, he would have returned to office without spending a fortune in bribes — and boasted a host and a prestige beyond all comparison with his present lot.
"And yet, was it not their defiance of the Ten Eunuchs — the very apex of power in these times — that allowed us to join hands with them?"
"True enough. All's well that ends well."
As it happened, there was a fool in some tiny rural county who had styled himself king, and Li Ru — seizing on the fact that it lay near Jincheng and Longxi — conceived his scheme and carried it through to success.
Dong Zhuo lowered his enormous frame into his chair and asked Li Ru:
"We have our justification. Now — is the army ready?"
"It is, my lord. Elite troops recruited solely from the strong men of your homeland — not the feeble court soldiery."
Li Ru had judged that one reason for Dong Zhuo's defeat at the Yellow Turbans' hands was the utter feebleness of the court armies, which had whiled away soft years in the central plains.
And who was his lord, Dong Zhuo?
Coarse of temper he might be, yet a hero of no small cunning and tremendous strength besides — and masterful with both bow and horse to boot.
His archery in particular was superb: he could draw and loose with either hand at will, and with startling speed.
Moreover, when he had marched into the central plains, his famed valiant generals — the Four Robbers, who had stood beside him since the old days, along with Hua Xiong and Hu Zhen — had been unable to take the field.
Viewed that way, losing to the fierce and surging Yellow Turbans of that time was only to be expected.
"And yet you must take care, my lord. The enemy is likewise a rising warlord — one who crushed the rebels and brought the whole of Liangzhou to heel."
"Haha! Could my elite troops possibly lose to an army mongrelized with barbarian blood?"
Elite soldiers who had stood and fought every time barbarians came pouring into the commanderies and counties of Tianshui and Anding.
What chance had a rabble scarcely better than former rebels against such men?
"You worry too much, Li Ru. We will win well enough in a straight fight."
"They say Ma Chao — Ma Teng's daughter — is renowned far and wide as the Splendid Ma Chao. A heroine who made her name putting down barbarians; some measure of caution would not be amiss..."
"Ha! She is but one woman, is she not? I have the Four Robbers — and Hua Xiong, a valiant general second to none under heaven!!"
"My thinking was short-sighted, my lord!!"
"Haha!! I am in too good a mood to hold it against you!!"
Dong Zhuo overflowed with self-conceit, and though Li Ru harbored his worries, neither of them truly believed they could lose.
'...How utterly foolish.'
Behind a pillar, a white-haired woman had been watching them — watching men brimming over with self-conceit.
Her golden eyes, glowing with a lustrous light that seemed fit to bewitch anyone they fell upon, regarded the warlord steeped in arrogance and vanity without the slightest stir of feeling.
'War is never a matter of numbers... Li Ru... it seems even that old fox's keen insight has grown badly clouded, so busy is he currying Dong Zhuo's favor.'
They trusted themselves beyond reason — and had not so much as made a proper inquiry into how Han Sui and Ma Teng had driven back the rebels, or how they had swelled their military strength.
'No sense lingering in their company only to be swept away in their ruin.'
Her instincts and her art of reading the currents had always been sharp to the point of prescience, and she trusted the intuition that had pulled her neck from the noose more times than she could count.
That intuition foretold it plainly: Dong Zhuo's army had not long to live.
He had always worn the face of a brutal ruler, but having blundered catastrophically in the Yellow Turban Rebellion and won no worthy merit to redeem it, his mounting fretfulness seemed to have bleached away the keen, intelligent bearing that had earned him renown in his youth.
In her eyes, Dong Zhuo's wits were simply gone.
A lord who puts the impulse of the moment above preparing for what is to come has no future at all.
She served such a man as her lord — yet he kept his son-in-law Li Ru close as his strategist, while she, a woman, was given nothing better than playing courier. Strategist's work? Not once.
The filthy, lecherous gaze she sometimes felt crawling over her was merely a bonus.
Li Ru the strategist — her fellow student under the same teacher — had likewise never ceased to envy and resent her talent.
There was no reason to keep faith with a lord who refused to use it.
'Come to think of it, they do say Han Sui's son is remarkably gifted... It might be no bad thing to meet him once.'
Han Sui, who had led Liangzhou — a land that would otherwise have spent years as lawless chaos, seething with rebels — into peace.
They said the influence of his son weighed heavily in the transformation of so ambitious a man.
She had meant to stop by her hometown of Wuwei Commandery in any case; meeting him along the way would cost her nothing.
'I have carried out the last order you gave me — and now there is no hope left for you. Then, farewell...'
She hung the official seal of her post upon the gates of the government office, and then, unhurried, vanished to somewhere far away.