The Battle of Didao (5)
In the age of the Three Kingdoms, battles were decided by more than numbers. Time and again, the outcome turned on a single warrior's valor or a commander's ability — even when the troops at their back were hopelessly few.
Zhang Liao, the general entrusted with Wei's front against Wu, had fallen upon Sun Quan's hundred-thousand-strong host at Hefei with a mere eight hundred horse. Paired halberds in hand, riding at the very tip of the charge, she churned through that vast army, blew it to flinders, and collapsed the enemy line — the hundred thousand of Wu were crushed before they ever fought in earnest.
Guan Yu, for her part, had ridden out alone, driven straight into the enemy's midst, and taken the head of Yan Liang as he directed the host from among his own men — a display of overwhelming might that froze the enemy soldiers where they stood, after which she turned and made her way back to Cao Cao's army at an unhurried pace.
Unbelievable as such episodes seem, they came not from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms but from the genuine historical records.
Nor were such figures rare. The era overflowed with generals who carried abilities that strained human belief — and Ma Chao was one of them.
Gifted with a brilliant strategic eye and martial might to match, Ma Chao had struck at the Battle of Tong Pass the instant Cao Cao's main body committed to a river crossing, and Cao Cao's soldiers had died in heaps without so much as a chance to respond.
Cao Cao herself would have met her end that day had it not been for Xu Chu: with the boatman rowing the vessel cut down, her bodyguard had raised a horse's saddle against the rain of arrows pouring down like a hail of poles while working the oar with his one free hand.
Cao Cao at that time was already beaten at Red Cliffs — and yet it was the first moment since she had left behind the era when Lü Bu and Xu Rong stalked her, since she had brought low Yuan Shao, the Conqueror of Hebei, that she was driven to death's very door.
That was the caliber of the woman — strategy and strength enough to carve her name into the histories — and it was for that reason I recommended to Fa Zheng that the finishing stroke against Dong Zhuo be delivered by none other than Ma Chao.
The enemy host, throwing its weight of numbers into a noose meant to smother Ma Chao and her riders, met a spear that split it at a single point — woman and beloved steed driving straight through the wall of men.
"Halt right there, Ma Chao!! Here stands Fuhu Diya, general of Dong Zhuo's army!!"
One of Dong Zhuo's officers had the courage to bar her charge as she raced toward Dong Zhuo himself.
"Get lost—!!"
CRASH!!
But Fuhu Diya, for all his gallant charge, was granted no last words; a single blow put him down for good.
"Tch — there's a damn horde of them!!"
Clicking her tongue at the insect-swarm density of the enemy, Ma Chao pressed on.
Beyond Fuhu Diya, Dong Zhuo's officers Zhang Long and Yang Ding likewise hurled themselves at her — and each time that frost-edged gleam flickered once, another rider hit the dirt.
Commanders dying one after another sent the rank and file of Dong Zhuo's army scattering in panic, and even the generals still on their feet grew loath to close with her.
...There he is.
Far across the field she picked out Dong Zhuo, staring after the figure of her racing like death incarnate — and hemmed in by a hostile army, amid the chaos of a thousand shifting bodies, her hawk-sharp eyes had still found their mark.
"Out of my way—!!"
Her heels struck the saddle; Shalifei surged, and Ma Chao bored deeper still into the enemy formation.
Shalifei, the sweat-blood horse to which Ma Chao had given that name, was swift and nimble enough to have once run down Cao Cao's own fleeing mount.
Each time her spear swept out as if she were performing her own legend, a handful of Dong Zhuo's soldiers went down, and the unhorsed were trampled underhoof.
"The enemy is few!! Stand your ground!!"
Zhang Ji did what he could to steady his panicked, cowering infantry and patch the collapsing line back together. Ma Chao's host numbered barely five thousand; if forty thousand could simply keep their heads, the charge could be stopped.
"The hell you will!!"
Before a chain of command could take shape, Ma Chao came howling in at Zhang Ji where he stood gathering his ranks. If the encirclement re-formed while a whole army still stood between her and escape, things would get ugly — she made that judgment in a heartbeat amid the bedlam, and acted on it at once.
CLANG!!
"Guhk—!!"
Zhang Ji barely managed to react to the spear flying in like a shaft of light. He was, after all, one of the Four Robbers, standing shoulder to shoulder with Li Jue and Guo Si, and in both arms and generalship he had held real weight within Dong Zhuo's army.
But measured against those two, the opponent he had drawn was in another league entirely. The spear he had barely turned aside was seized and wrenched off its line by sheer strength; the shaft's path bent like a striking serpent and darted for his wide-open belly.
SHLUCK!!
"...Kuh—hack."
His belly run through by Ma Chao's spear, Zhang Ji slid from the saddle and became, like the officers before him, a guest who would never ride home.
"There — General Zhang Ji has fallen!!"
As the cry rippled through the host, Dong Zhuo — who had watched the whole scene unfold — broke into a cold sweat, his throat burning under a fear that crept closer with every heartbeat.
Unlike the slack imperial armies of the Central Plains, his men had spent their years putting down the frontier tribes; they were veterans to a man, an elite force he could rightly boast of.
Yet even those vaunted soldiers could not check Ma Chao's advance for a single breath — punched through, helpless, they toppled like scarecrows.
...She's that strong before she's even turned twenty?!
Only once before had Dong Zhuo laid eyes on martial might of that order.
His body had gone to seed since those days, but Dong Zhuo had been a general of innate strength and superb archery in his own right, and the keen eye that knew a fierce commander on sight had lost nothing of its edge.
Ma Chao's prowess was of a kind with the volunteer captains who had led irregulars to his aid two years past, when the Yellow Turbans routed him and sent him running. Two of those men had stood out as monsters in their own right — and Ma Chao sat a shade below them, at much the same level.
The sight of her, showing off such valor against his strong, hard-bitten soldiers with almost unearthly skill, left Dong Zhuo pale and reeling; a cold dread settled into his marrow.
"My lord! You must get clear at once!!"
Somehow Ma Chao was within arm's reach before he knew it, and when Li Ru roared from beside him, Dong Zhuo finally came back to himself.
"......We fall back—!!"
Dragging his lurching bulk behind him, he ran for the stable and the Red Hare waiting there. Whatever wonder Shalifei might be, it could never outrun the horse hailed as first among all horses.
WHAM!!
"DONG ZHUO—!!!"
The moment she caught him fleeing, Ma Chao went to work. Spear whirling, she shook off the infantry and spearmen flinging themselves across her path, skewered the throats of officers lunging at her flanks, snapped necks with sweeping shafts — and pressed on without an ounce of mercy. A predator's face, utterly at odds with those fine, pretty features.
"GRAAAAGH—!!"
Dong Zhuo, prey at last, scrambled up onto Red Hare in the stable.
"Go! Move!!"
Red Hare was a notoriously trying animal to break, but in sheer speed it could boast itself the finest of all the Ferghana breeds.
I have to stop him!!
She could not let him slip away like this. Ma Chao drove her heels into her horse's flank, and Shalifei answered, accelerating harder still.
But with Dong Zhuo's leaden bulk in the saddle, even Red Hare could not simply call up the thousand-li-a-day burst it was famous for.
If she meant to take him, mounted on that horse, this moment was the only chance she would get.
"The one in the purple battle-robe — that's Dong Zhuo!!"
At the shout, Dong Zhuo's body moved on pure reflex: he clawed off the violet robe he wore and flung it away.
"The one with the bandit's beard — that's Dong Zhuo!!"
"Damn it!!"
The call rang out again, and Dong Zhuo ripped his long sleeves away with brute strength, winding the cloth across his jaw to smother the beard.
"That blubber-stuffed hog — that's Dong Zhuo!! Catch the pig on horseback!!!"
His fat, alas, could not be peeled off with the rest. Gnashing his teeth, Dong Zhuo could only lay the whip to Red Hare. Every shout hunting him down cinched around his throat like a rope; the terror went bone-deep.
And then — perhaps sensing its master's desperation — Red Hare began, little by little, to quicken.
"F-fire! Loose, all of you!! Stop her!!"
At Li Ru's shrill command the archers hurriedly bent their bows on Ma Chao, then let fly, releasing the taut strings.
Into the arrowheads streaming down like a cloudburst, Ma Chao whipped her spear from side to side in turns, sweeping the storm out of the air to shield horse and rider both.
Now and then a shaft kissed her body — but the leather armor Han Yeong had given her turned every touch, and not one drew blood. The horse, every inch the Ferghana, was clever enough to sidestep arrows on its own initiative; whatever it could not evade, Ma Chao struck from the sky.
But beside Ma Chao, whose speed never wavered, Dong Zhuo — that pig of a man, a jolly "harmony" of muscle and lard — was another matter entirely; even the peerless Red Hare struggled to reach full stride under such a load.
As the gap between them shrank, Dong Zhuo gambled on one last desperation: he drew the great bow slung at his waist and leveled it at her.
With strength that beggared belief, the bow came back full and quivering.
"Die!!"
The arrow tore through the wind; Ma Chao snapped her head aside —
SHWIP!
— but not quite far enough. The fierce shaft raked across her cheek, carving a thin line of red that welled and ran.
"That goddamn pig......"
Furious at the imperfect dodge, the jade-green light of her eyes went glacial; she laid the whip to Shalifei and poured on speed.
"Drop dead—!!"
Another arrow leapt from the string; Ma Chao met it with a roll of her spear and knocked it spinning from the sky.
"You damn bitch!!"
By then the range had closed past any leisure for shooting; Dong Zhuo hauled out a great blade and met her head-on.
KLANG!!
A blow heavy as a swinging boulder crashed against her incoming shaft. Feeling the weight of it, Ma Chao's eyes widened a fraction.
...His strength is Father's equal.
It would be easy to misjudge Dong Zhuo for the cunning in his face and the treachery of his schemes, but he had once made his name as a hero of Liang Province, and he had always carried the force of arm to guard his own hide.
But he's slow, next to Father.
Ma Teng might lose a step to his own daughter, but he had trained without pause so as never to be a burden, and for all his muscle, nothing of his quickness had dulled. This man was his exact opposite — a slab of fat packed between well-built muscle until the man himself had become a pig.
Dong Zhuo swung at her with everything in him, yet strike after strike was turned by Ma Chao's craft. Exchange by exchange her strength only welled higher, while his blade dragged slower and slower. A middle-aged body past its prime, a frame of matchless sluggishness — by rights, holding his own against Ma Chao at all under such conditions was its own small feat.
KLANG!!
Snatching at an opening, Ma Chao beat his blade clean out of his hands.
"It's over!!"
Her spear darted for his skull like a ray of light —
But—
—WHOOM!!
The thrust that should have ended it grazed his face by a hair's breadth and flew past, wide. A red line opened across Dong Zhuo's cheek, welling blood.
"What the—?! Why—!!"
The stride of the horse beneath her was slowing.
Red Hare, settling into its crushing burden, had begun to accelerate as it found its rhythm — and Shalifei, sprinting itself ragged to keep pace, had finally burned through its strength.
Bit by bit Shalifei's speed bled away, until at last the white horse pulled up short, heaving great ragged breaths.
To have matched Red Hare, if only for a heartbeat, was proof enough that Shalifei was a prodigy among horses...... and yet.
Dong Zhuo rode the Red Hare into the distance without so much as a glance back.
"......Aw, hell! Goddammit—!! I had him!!"
The dog that chases the hen goes home with nothing — Ma Chao, robbed of meat already at her lips, stamped the ground in fury and spat out her rage at the sky.
Dong Zhuo's head had slipped through her fingers, but back at the camp Li Ru and a host of his officers were clapped in bonds, and the army that had straddled both Liang and Yong Provinces reeled from a defeat that cut to the bone.
Thus the Battle of Didao — the contest for hegemony over Liang and Yong — came to its end.