The Aftermath (1)
The fierce battle at Didao had drawn to a close. With Dong Zhuo's chain of command in ruins, his soldiers had either thrown down their arms or scattered in flight toward Tianshui.
The open plain lay carpeted in dark-red corpses — the enemy dead alone were estimated at some thirty thousand. As dusk began to settle over the desolate field, the ground grew sodden and black with blood, and hungry crows wheeled down to tear at the flesh of the fallen, already gone cold. Li Ru, Dong Zhuo's son-in-law and strategist, had been taken prisoner along with a host of other officers. It was an unprecedented victory.
I had been waiting for Ma Chao when she finally appeared, and the sight of her state stunned me. The leather armor I had given her was scored with countless raw gashes, as though raked by sharpened weaponry, and a faint cut, as if traced by a blade's edge, was etched across her cheek.
I stepped close and dabbed away the blood trickling down her face with my handkerchief.
"...Wh-what are you doing!!"
Ma Chao, who had been trudging over with a face full of shame at having let Dong Zhuo's precious head slip through her fingers, jolted back in alarm at my sudden approach. The voice that burst out of her was a shrill squeal, badly suited to the dragon of a general who had swept across the battlefield like a storm.
"You all right? ...I'm sorry. I pushed you too hard."
She had stood at the very point of our line, carving a path through a vast army — and for that task, no one but Ma Chao or Pang De, with their overwhelming strength, had been fit for the job. If a warrior like Ma Chao, who hadn't taken so much as a scratch even in the campaign against the rebels, had come away wounded, the fighting must have been ferocious indeed. Even we modern folk groan plenty when a paper edge nicks a finger or we bang a foot on something — how much worse, then, to be cut by steel or pierced by an arrow?
"...N-no, you don't have to!! Something like this heals right up if you spit on it..."
Ma Chao tried to squirm out of my reach in embarrassment, but I flatly refused to let her.
"No. What if it leaves a scar?"
It was my hand doing the tending, which was the only reason she grumbled and accepted it. But leave the wound untreated here, and I knew she would skip the physician out of sheer laziness and let it fend for itself. Ma Chao's face was a national treasure in its own right — the celebrated Greatest Beauty of Xiliang, no less. How could I possibly hand a scar free rein over it?
Pressing too hard might tear the wound open again, so with the gentlest touch I could manage, barely any strength at all, I stroked the gash tenderly as I cleaned it away. A faint flush of red crept up over Ma Chao's face.
The soldiers who watched Han Yeong fish medicine from his coat and apply it with such tender devotion murmured that the sight was sweet enough to make them forget the carnage of the battlefield.
"...Perhaps I should have taken a wound myself."
Pang De, who had been watching the whole scene, stroked her own cheek and murmured in a voice tinged with something unmistakably wistful, while Fa Zheng narrowed her eyes and looked on with a faintly sulky scowl.
"...Ahem."
"...We'll come by some other time, then."
Ma Teng and Yan Xing, reading the room and choosing not to intrude, quietly withdrew on the spot.
Once her wound was dressed, the Ma brothers teased their big sister about how scarlet her face had gone — and Ma Chao shrieked loud enough to rattle the camp and bolted off to who-knows-where.
Dong Zhuo had escaped with his skin intact, and his faction — Zhang Xiu among them — still lingered in Yong Province, but that was a problem for later; for now, we celebrated our immediate victory. You get proper work out of people only when you let them rest when rest is due.
That said, knowing the sort of lunatic who would put a perfectly good metropolis to the torch and run, we could afford only a few days' reprieve before moving on Yong Province. We levied fines on the warlords who had sat the fight out and confiscated their property, and with the treasure amassed from the spoils of war, made ready to hold a feast in the soldiers' honor.
"I'll be taking this one, if you don't mind."
"S-spare my life!! Please!!"
Fa Zheng, having stumbled upon Fan Chou in chains after his failed escape, bore him off with a chillingly sweet smile. What was it she'd said — that she couldn't forgive him for trying to draw his blade on me?
With Fa Zheng gone from my side, and the officers and men all crowding about in high spirits as they readied the banquet, I was left attending to the postwar cleanup.
'What happens now?'
Dong Zhuo may have thrown the first punch and started this war, but thus far neither He Jin nor the Ten Attendants had shown the slightest reaction.
'Is it simply none of their concern — a frontier scrap in Liang Province, far from the Central Plains?'
As I turned the future over in my mind and managed the materiel captured in this war, Jia Xu came looking for me, Huche'er trailing at her side. Clad in the face of a gumiho built to beguile men's reason, she gazed at me through a sultry smile and paid me her candid compliments. With that honeyed voice and that bewitching face, even an old man at death's door would likely find himself hale and hearty by morning. Judged on looks alone, she was a beauty who could stand toe to toe even with Ma Chao.
"Magnificent, my lord. I never dreamed you would pull off a victory this sweeping."
"I didn't do anything. I couldn't even kill Dong Zhuo."
In the end, we never did turn up where Dong Zhuo had fled aboard Red Hare. Privately, I'd half hoped Red Hare would prove too vicious a mount for the man to stay on... was that too heartless of me? Living up to its standing as the Three Kingdoms' one and only supercar, even Ma Chao's prized steed hadn't been able to match its pace.
"How modest you are. But all the world knows how brilliantly the constellation of remarkable generals you gathered performed this time."
"..."
It was true, though.
Jia Xu was taking my deflection for modesty.
"But from here on, the warlords will keep a far warier eye on you, Lord Han Yeong. You annihilated the army of Dong Zhuo — who ruled over Yong Province — from a Liang Province that might as well be the edge of the map."
Dong Zhuo, like Han Sui, had been a great warlord whose dominion spanned a broad stretch of Xiliang and all of Yong Province, and the aftershock of crushing him was immense. In territory held and influence wielded he had outstripped even Han Sui, which was why the armchair connoisseurs of the Central Plains, so fond of flapping their gums, had all wagered on his victory. But the result was Dong Zhuo's defeat. Worse still, Hua Xiong and the fierce generals who formed the pillars and mainstay of his army lay dead. The loss was staggering. With wounds like these, he might well no longer possess the strength to be summoned up to Luoyang.
Our own losses, of course, were not negligible either. Out of fifty thousand, some ten thousand had been killed or wounded — yet for a force fighting at a disadvantage in numbers, that amounted to a stirring performance.
There was Fa Zheng, whose peerless insight read the intentions of the wavering warlords and saw through Li Ru's schemes, readying us against the flank assault; and Pang De, who discharged her duty as vanguard with distinction, cutting down Hua Xiong and the other commanders in whom Dong Zhuo's army took such pride.
There were my brother Yan Xing and Uncle Ma Teng, who met Li Jue's and Guo Si's troops — the twin ramparts of Dong Zhuo's army — head-on and threw them back in fine style. And most decisive of all was Ma Chao, who led a detached force to fall upon Dong Zhuo's unguarded camp from the rear, slaughtering Zhang Ji and many another officer besides, and driving Dong Zhuo to within a hair's breadth of death — the very hinge of our victory.
Beyond them, Fa Yan had shouldered the supply lines and civil administration, my father and Chenggong Ying had kept watch for any suspicious stirrings among the other warlords, and our brave soldiers, who had endured the harshest, most punishing training, now showed the fruits of every day of it. Through the exploits and the grit of so many, this war was won.
As for me, riding along under the Ma brothers' guard, I had more or less passed the battle in perfect peace, doing a fine job of doubling as the captain of the cheering squad.
"You've won your victory, so I suppose I too must keep my promise. Leave the persuading of the magnates of Yong and Liang Provinces to me."
"Then I'm counting on you."
If the magnates of the region rallied to us when we marched on Yong Province, its occupation would be a matter of time and nothing more.
"You must see Dong Zhuo's kin put to death, without fail. Sparing them would profit you nothing whatsoever."
She wasn't wrong. We had annihilated their core fighting strength — Hua Xiong and the Four Robbers foremost — but those who could still be called remnants remained. Dong Zhuo himself, fled; his younger brother Dong Min; his nephew Dong Huang; and even Niu Fu, the son-in-law who had abandoned his own father-in-law in the middle of the war and run to save his neck. With Li Ru, their brain, in our custody they would hardly manage any cunning tricks, but they remained a malignant mass that had to be cut out all the same.
'Keeping them alive would be utterly worthless anyway.'
In the official histories and the Romance alike, these were vermin who had fattened on Dong Zhuo's protection the moment he grasped power, committing atrocity after atrocity. If our army was to take complete control of Liang and Yong Provinces, they were a crowd that had to be eradicated, no question about it.
Jia Xu took a sip of the tea set before her, then put her request to me.
"...In truth, I came asking a separate favor."
"And what would that be?"
"Would you hand Li Ru, Dong Zhuo's strategist, over to me?"
"Li Ru...? What exactly do you intend to do with him?"
"Ah, rest easy. I haven't the slightest thought of sparing him. It is only that I owe that old man a rather large debt."
Far from having my heart skip at the sight of Jia Xu smiling so bewitchingly — enough to make easy prey of the hardiest of men — I felt an involuntary chill crawl up my spine.
'He won't be dying a gentle death.'
In the gleam of the smiling Jia Xu's eyes I sensed a shiver of killing intent, grasped Li Ru's fate in that instant, and gave my consent. He was the sack of wisdom who had greased the wheels of every one of Dong Zhuo's atrocities, and he had never shown one grain of remorse for the people he trampled. So I hadn't the slightest intention of sparing Li Ru, either.
"...Do as you wish."
"Hehe. Thank you kindly."
Jia Xu rose from her seat with a demure little smile.
"Then I shall withdraw for now."
"The banquet begins soon. You won't attend?"
Out of courtesy, I floated the invitation, half-heartedly enough.
"I watched the situation unfold without earning so much as a scrap of merit — how could I presume to sit at your table? Next time I shall come bearing better news. My lord."
Having changed how she addressed me — from "Lord Han Yeong" to "my lord" — she declined an escort once again and, with Huche'er at her side, was gone like the wind.
'My lord,' is it...
Jia Xu now counted me as her lord, and with her, our army's council of strategists had grown by one more. I couldn't hide my pleasure at either.
"Young Master!!"
Yan Xing came looking for me where I sat. He, too, had traded the martial garb he usually wore for somewhat grander attire suited to a banquet.
"The banquet's ready. Ma Chao is raising a proper ruckus, demanding we bring you over at once?"
"All right, all right. I'm coming."
He was a brother many years my senior, and yet Yan Xing's face was lit up like a boy's at a festival. At the sight of him so thoroughly worked up, I set my work aside, allowed myself a wry smile, and stepped out of my quarters.