The Qiang People (3)
From the Yellow Turban Rebellion to the Age of Warlords
In most creative works, Romance of the Three Kingdoms chief among them, the situation of the Liangzhou warlords Ma Teng and Han Sui during this period goes almost entirely undepicted. At best, aside from Ma Teng putting his name to Dong Cheng's petition after Lu Bu's destruction, the two barely register until the Battle of Red Cliffs has come and gone.
The Romance does claim that Ma Teng took the field among the eighteen lords in the campaign against Dong Zhuo, but that was blatant fiction to begin with. As a kid I'd never touched the official histories, and since the story's focus was fixed on its protagonists—the Liu Bei trio—and on Cao Cao, nothing about it struck me as odd back then.
But according to the official histories I only came to know as an adult, far from joining the anti-Dong Zhuo coalition, Ma Teng and Han Sui nearly went under the traitor Dong Zhuo's banner to cooperate with him in actual history. It was only when Dong Zhuo lost his head to Lu Bu—the very icon of betrayal—that the prospect fell through...
Geography made it no better. Dong Zhuo's forces still held considerable sway across Liangzhou at the time, and to march from Liangzhou to Hulao Pass, one inevitably had to pass through Chang'an and Luoyang unless one traveled by the Yellow River waterways. Would Dong Zhuo simply stand by while a lord in open revolt against him marched an army right past his gates? Naturally, the sensible outcome was that Ma Teng could never lead an army through Sili Province, the heart of Dong Zhuo's power. In other words, Ma Teng joining the anti-Dong Zhuo coalition as written in the Romance was all but impossible.
Perhaps that's why what I remember is a Ma Teng whose name was merely listed among the lords who fought at Hulao Pass—and for all that he's billed as the father of the Five Tiger General Ma Chao and a loyal servant of the Han, a man with no feats to speak of in the campaign against Dong Zhuo.
'But things will be different now.'
In the original history, Han Sui and Ma Teng were destined to raise their banner in revolt in Liangzhou around the time of the Yellow Turban Rebellion; now, they were preparing to submit to the Han at a far earlier stage. The reason for the submission is that my father, Han Sui, was a branded rebel with a record of having joined the uprising that broke out in Liangzhou back in his days as a provincial clerk. Long ago, Han Sui's true name was Han Yue. He joined the Liangzhou revolt and failed, then changed his name to dodge the court's wanted lists.
Had events followed their original course, a second uprising—the revolt of Han Sui and Bian Zhang—should have erupted, but my birth put a stop to that and moved our submission to the court up the schedule. Common sense says no state accepts the surrender of a man who has already taken up arms against it once, and yet in the original history, his submission was accepted. Presumably because the court's reach into Liangzhou was so shallow, and because it was not their own blood that would be spilled there. There is also a record that Han Sui once served under He Jin, and I suspect the two facts are related.
In any case, having asked to submit to the court this early, we should be able to involve ourselves in the affairs of the central plains before the anti-Dong Zhuo coalition ever forms. If we could somehow rein in the tyranny Dong Zhuo would later unleash, and keep the Han from splintering apart, the world might turn out a little better for it. For that, we needed a title to stand behind us and territory to serve as our base, so my father had recently made the trip to Luoyang.
But...
"Beigong Boyu?"
"That's right. They say they'll only expunge my past crimes and formally grant me the title of Administrator of Jincheng if we bring back that son of a bitch's head."
"Tch. If I'd known it would come to this, I should have chased him down back then, no matter what it took, and taken his head myself."
Uncle Ma Teng smacked his fist into his palm and clicked his lips in regret.
Beigong Boyu
A warlord of Qiang stock—the man who, had I never intervened, would have been raised to general by Han Sui so the two of them could defy the court together.
But because I—a person who should never have existed—had stepped in, my father abandoned his revolt against the Han and instead rallied Ma Teng's household and forces to his side. That was why Beigong Boyu had allied with two other Liangzhou magnates, Li Wenhou and Bian Zhang, and invaded this very Jincheng Commandery last year, only to be chased all the way back to Wuwei Commandery by the outstanding valor of Ma Teng.
We had barely managed to rout them, yet they were still banding together with magnates who resented the Han, gathering troops all the while. And now the Han was demanding, as the price of our submission, the head of that very man—the ringleader of the entire Liangzhou uprising...
"...So it's 'using barbarians to control barbarians,' is it?"
At the words that slipped out of me, my brow knotted, Han Sui looked my way and spoke.
"You think so too?"
"Yes. Their intent is plain to see."
"Using barbarians to control barbarians? What's that supposed to mean?"
Ma Chao—peerless in personal valor, regrettably shallow in book learning—tilted her head as she asked. Faced with that guileless expression, I hesitated a moment. To the Han, peoples like the Qiang were nothing more than savages, and Ma Chao herself carried Qiang blood in her veins; laying the word bare in front of her could amount to a grave insult. Worried that spelling out the 'barbarian' part would sting, I softened it as much as I could and gave her the short version.
"In a word: they'd rather not waste their own strength all the way out on the frontier, so they mean to use us instead."
It struck me as the answer of a central government too strained to send armies to the borderlands—doubled as a test of the loyalty of a man who had once rebelled and now sought to come in from the cold. Perhaps because the first omens of the Ten Attendants' uprising were already showing at this point, the court's unwillingness to bleed its national strength out to the frontier showed through every word.
Ma Chao listened to my brief explanation, then gave my shoulder a pat as though that counted as understanding, and paid me a compliment.
"Ooh~ sharp as ever, aren't you?"
"It's hardly that much..."
Truthfully, as Ma Chao said, it struck me anew: perhaps because I'd been born the son of Han Sui—a man whose Intelligence stat in the games was fairly high—my mind genuinely turned over far more smoothly than it had in my previous life.
"Honestly, this works out great, doesn't it? I've been itching for a fight anyway."
Ma Chao cracked her knuckles one by one, a combative grin spreading across her face.
In last year's battle with Beigong Boyu she had only just come of age, and as green as she was in her first real action, she had fought attached to the center army rather than the vanguard. Even then she had cut down a few dozen enemy soldiers, but she'd grumbled to me at length about how she'd failed to do anything worth noticing.
"Well, then you can just make a big name for yourself this time, can't you?"
"Obviously!! This time I'm going to spread the name of Splendid Ma Chao across every corner of Liangzhou!!"
While Ma Chao burned with fighting spirit—every inch the valorous general who would one day shake the whole world—I turned my gaze to my father and my uncle. The two of them appeared to be deep in a discussion of troop organization and army grain.
'What do I do...'
Time was a little too tight for careful maneuvering. According to the official histories, Beigong Boyu would eventually be murdered by Han Sui, and the soldiers under his command—more than one hundred thousand of them—would be absorbed into Han Sui's army. That was meant to happen some two years from now, but if they were beaten back by our army and went scrambling to rebuild their forces, that number would only balloon.
'We could probably manage it...'
But I couldn't quite convince myself we would win. Beigong Boyu had soldiers to spare, yet not a single general famous enough to deserve the name. Our side, for its part, had Splendid Ma Chao—though she was a green young thing who had only just turned sixteen—and while Yan Xing and Ma Teng were fierce fighters both, something fell short of calling them peerless warriors of the realm.
'How much easier everything would be with a strategist at a time like this.'
With a strategist who could snare a great host using a small force and a handful of schemes, the risks weighing on us would shrink enormously. The lack of one had always been a quiet regret.
Not that our military strength was poor—quite the opposite; our pool of talent ran deeper than that of most lords. For field generals who lead armies and flaunt their valor we had Ma Chao, Ma Teng, and Yan Xing, and for command officers who arranged formations and pressed the enemy we had Han Sui, Cheng Gongying, and others besides.
And then there were the generals who would one day serve under us—though not yet. Pang De, who would put an arrow squarely into the great Guan Yu's forehead and drive him to the brink of death, and Ma Dai, who would serve in exactly the right posts clear into Shu Han's final years...
'...When I think of that, I can only count myself lucky I wasn't born Yan Baihu's son.'
Had I come into the world as the child of Yan Baihu—a man whose fearsome reputation was all name and no substance—I'd have been stuck in a hopeless situation, without a single usable general or strategist, nothing but my uncle Yan Yu at my side.
Apart from the missing strategist, our overall balance wasn't bad at all compared to the other lords. It looked far better indeed next to Gongsun Zan, whose style most resembled ours—cavalry above all—yet whose talent pool was downright pitiful.
'That's exactly why I tried to recruit Jia Xu right from the start...'
A few years back I had sent men to seek out Jia Xu, the master strategist of Liangzhou, and bring her into the fold—but she had already left Wuwei Commandery, and had shown herself nowhere since. She was a woman whose wanderings ranged far and wide; by now she might well have entered Dong Zhuo's service, just as history prescribed.
'Nothing to be done about what's lacking, I suppose...'
With war on our very doorstep, I set aside the thought that a strategist was our most urgent need; for now, all I could do was give my best to the things within my reach.
"Father, I'll step out for a little while."
"Hmm? Yes, go on."
Before the council could settle on my father's final course of action, I turned my steps away to run an experiment with double stirrups.
"Young Master, where might you be going?"
Yan Xing fell in behind me as I left the council mid-session and asked.
I held up the materials in my right hand as I answered.
"I'm going to refine these a bit and put them to the test."
Compared to the people around me I was no fighter, merely somewhat clever—and this was one of the few advantages I could claim with confidence. Knowing the course of Three Kingdoms history, and the knowledge carried back from the future.
Without a strategist at hand, my task was to squeeze every drop of use out of that future knowledge and shave down the dangers bearing down on us as far as they would go.
I left the house and hurried toward the workshop, and Yan Xing quickened his pace to follow.