The Sowing Discord Stratagem (2)
Enraged by the rumor that Jia Xu's scheming had loosed across Luoyang, Ding Yuan summoned Lü Bu—confined under house arrest at Dunying—to call her to account.
"Explain yourself, this instant! What is the meaning of this!!"
"I keep telling you! I don't know what's going on!"
Faced with Ding Yuan pressing her like a criminal on trial, Lü Bu shot back, her features twisting into a fierce scowl. That defiant bearing only inflamed him further—yet from where she stood, she was genuinely wronged.
Under the house arrest order, Lü Bu had simply kept to her tent, quietly passing her days over cups of wine with the Eight Elite Cavalrymen—Zhang Liao and Gao Shun among them—who came to comfort her. She had never once left the camp for Luoyang without Ding Yuan's leave, nor run her mouth recklessly. If anything, she had been the one consoling the Eight as they drank and vented their grievances, cursing her adoptive father Ding Yuan all the while. The rumor that had burst across Luoyang out of nowhere left Lü Bu herself nothing but bewildered.
But neither of the two was quick enough of mind to dig into the matter in any depth, and with the friction already between them, the gulf of feeling only grew deeper.
The rumor Jia Xu had spread by buying off one person after another in Luoyang with her funds set fire once more to Ding Yuan's temper—he already balked at employing Lü Bu, now that a vast host of Luoyang troops sat in his grasp.
"It's all slander!! Do you actually believe that, Father?!"
She had chafed under the confinement she drew for putting a stop to the atrocities of soldiers who were little better than bandits, but never once had she dreamed of stepping over Ding Yuan to become the supreme power of their faction. She had plenty of complaints about his conduct, yet she owed her adoptive father so much that she had swallowed every resentment. To her protestations of such wrongs, Ding Yuan waved her off as if her words deserved not even a hearing.
"Silence! If rumors are spreading through Luoyang, doesn't that mean you did something to draw suspicion!!"
From where Ding Yuan stood, the thought that the enemy might have seeded the rumor deliberately never once crossed his mind. Lü Bu had already committed one suspicious act after another, stretching all the way back to Bingzhou.
After crushing the Black Mountain Bandits and being revered as the Unrivaled Under Heaven by countless common folk, she had courted the people's hearts by handing out war spoils to those starving in the famine. Dividing the spoils was supposed to be settled in discussion with him first, and her doing it on her own initiative stirred a deep displeasure in Ding Yuan—for it was the spitting image of what he himself had done in his youth to cement his influence in Bingzhou.
On top of that, she had defied his orders by opposing the pillaging at Mengjin, and then punished the very soldiers he had licensed to loot and unwind—without reporting to him, without his sanction. Judging from such conduct, Ding Yuan concluded that Lü Bu, with her rebellious temperament, harbored the ambition to cast him aside and make herself a power of the Han court.
'There's more than one suspicious circumstance—far more than one! She is without a doubt trying to drive me out...!!'
Wary of Lü Bu's swelling influence, Ding Yuan had deliberately shut her out of the recent distribution of rewards for merit, raising her to no new office. Nothing showed on the surface, but while the two were at each other's throats, whispers that she meant to oust him were already rising and falling on every tongue. Ding Yuan judged that he could not afford to give Lü Bu another chance to burnish her name.
"This war I will wage with my own strength alone. If you're so blameless, then sit still and content yourself with guarding Dunying!!"
"......You're serious? You mean to fight without me?"
Lü Bu stared in bewilderment at Ding Yuan's declaration that he would fight without her—she, who had always stood at the vanguard of the Bingzhou army.
"Don't dismiss me. When it comes to campaigning through battlefields, I have far more experience than you."
The sheer confidence in his tone left Lü Bu momentarily at a loss for words.
With no strategist to devise plans and schemes, the Bingzhou army's strategy had always been brutally simple: Lü Bu, blessed with the finest martial prowess under heaven and the valor of a roaring tiger, would take the point, storm forward, and shatter the enemy's formation. Once the vanguard Lü Bu pinned the foe beneath her overwhelming might, the officers and men who witnessed it would find their morale kindled all at once, surging ahead as one to sweep the field like autumn wind through fallen leaves. That was the great reason the Bingzhou army, facing the heinous Black Mountain Bandits, was hailed as an elite force where one man was worth a hundred. And yet here he was, declaring on the eve of war that he would cast aside that familiar strategy—without so much as a single drill to prepare.
"And I will be reassigning the generals of the Eight Elite Cavalrymen under your command to my own."
"......And you think that alone will be enough?"
"I, too, was once a general who ranged across battlefields!! Do you think I would fight without a single stratagem in hand?!"
Though his body had aged, the swagger of his youth had lost none of its force; even now he could likely overpower a young soldier or two with ease. Among the fierce generals who had made their names sweeping the northern tribes—Lü Bu, Gongsun Zan, and their like—Ding Yuan prided that none could match his seasoned craft on the battlefield.
"......Fine. Do as you please."
Under that venomous stare of Ding Yuan's, which refused to believe a word of her defense, Lü Bu gave up on explaining herself, heaved a deep sigh, and left the tent.
"That insolent wench..."
Her wits were slow when it came to the fundamentals, but she came from what had once been a respectable family and could manage her letters, which was why he had installed her as Chief Clerk and had her serve as Bugou Sima, commander of his personal troops. He had raised her through the ranks on the strength of her merits subjugating the tribes, but Ding Yuan now found himself wondering whether it was time to strip those offices away.
Lü Bu was no longer merely a subordinate or an adopted daughter, but a black-haired beast eyeing his seat. With the court's highest power clutched in his fist, his sense of crisis had only sharpened.
To be fair, Ding Yuan was not entirely without sense. Rather than moving to punish her, he arranged the order of battle so that she would be held in reserve at Dunying—barred from the field, and thus from any chance of earning glory. It was a safeguard for the worst-case moment when Han Yeong's army might drive them back, so that he could unleash Lü Bu to hurl them out.
'......A host of seventy thousand. More than double the thirty thousand I started with.'
Should he triumph over Han Yeong, the other generals who had done nothing but watch Yuan Shao's moods, along with the court officials, would finally bend the knee—and his armies would swell beyond reckoning.
'A chance that came late in life. I must seize it...'
"General!!"
Zhang Yang, his face hidden behind a veil, came rushing headlong to Ding Yuan's quarters.
"What is it?"
"Is it true you will not be sending General Lü Bu into this battle?"
"It is. This time I mean to entrust her with the defense of Dunying. Is there a problem?"
"Will that truly be safe? Our opponent is the Hegemon of Liang Province—the man who crushed the rebels and smashed even Dong Zhuo!!"
Zhang Yang could only stand there dumbfounded by Ding Yuan's complete lack of urgency.
"This is Han Yeong's army, the force with a record of destroying hosts far greater than ours! And yet you will not set General Lü Bu at the vanguard!!"
"Enough noise!! The matter is already decided!! And beyond Lü Bu, I have outstanding generals in plenty!!"
Yet for all his bluster, he had no intention of employing Zhang Liao and Gao Shun either—Lü Bu's hands and feet, and the pillars of the Eight Elite Cavalrymen. They too boasted superb martial skill and military genius, but he dreaded that letting them shine would diminish his own influence in this war.
"Is this because of the rumors drifting among the people? Do not lend your ears to mere gossip!!"
Zhang Yang, who had practiced politics at court, knew better than anyone how bloated and hollow rumors could become. For all he knew, this was a snare the enemy had woven for the very purpose of keeping Lü Bu off the battlefield.
And yet...
"I can win well enough without the likes of Lü Bu! Do not set me—a hegemon who holds power—on the same plane as Dong Zhuo, a defeated man!!"
Ding Yuan, who no longer meant to employ a woman who threatened his standing, let the counsel fall on deaf ears. His head was packed full of nothing but inferiority toward her.
Roaring with fury, Ding Yuan sprang up from his seat and, stubborn as a mule and plainly unwilling to hear another word, marched straight into his chamber.
"That insufferable fool..."
This was exactly why generals of frontier birth had no business playing politics. Zhang Yang felt a suffocating frustration at Ding Yuan's refusal to heed him. Dong Zhuo, for all his faults, had greased the court with bribes and possessed a fair degree of political sense—at the very least, he would have lent an ear.
'It unsettles me, seeing things turn out this way.'
At the outset, he had judged that with Lü Bu leading the vanguard of their great host, Han Yeong's army could readily be beaten. But Ding Yuan, whose faith in his own general could be shaken by nothing more than street gossip, struck him as utterly pathetic.
'If I were free to move as I pleased, I could have uncovered whoever stood behind those rumors...'
Zhang Yang rued the constraints of his faked death, which left him unable to move freely at court.
'But I cannot simply sit on my hands, either.'
To prepare for the worst, Zhang Yang made his way somewhere and began drafting a letter.
'......How on earth did it come to this?'
Lü Bu let out a long sigh under the weight of Ding Yuan's distrust. They had clashed over opinions a few times back in Bingzhou, true, but never with hostility so naked as this. Ever since the affair at Mengjin, her relationship with her adoptive father had soured at a staggering pace.
'He looked after me for ten years—why can't he see who I am...?'
"Lady Fengxian!!"
"Wenyuan?"
At the voice of the one female general she considered her equal ringing out from the camp gate, Lü Bu turned her gaze that way. A beauty with chestnut-brown hair and a clean, graceful bearing rode up to her, Azure Dragon Halberds in hand; from the sweat glistening on her, she had evidently been drilling at arms only moments before.
Her name was Zhang Liao, Wenyuan. Her martial prowess and gift for command stood out even within Bingzhou; she was one of the very few warriors Lü Bu acknowledged, and might well be called the leading light of the Eight Elite Cavalrymen, Lü Bu's own direct officers.
"What did Governor Ding have to say?"
"That we're to keep out of this battle with Han Yeong's army and hold the camp."
"......I see."
"Well, it can't be helped. Even if Father spurns me over some rumor, he did take me in when I had no family and made a general of me at that."
The reason Lü Bu could not work up true rage against Ding Yuan was that she had never forgotten the grace he had shown her. She had lost her family to the Xiongnu and Xianbei of the north and lived on nothing but the vow to kill them—and it was Ding Yuan who took that girl into his army.
Had he not gathered her into the ranks, she would have gone on living like some lone huntress until the tribes that kept pouring across the border brought her wretched life to its end. That was why, however vicious his tirades became, Lü Bu could never bring herself to betray him.
Zhang Liao, who had been quietly fretting over how listless her general seemed, nodded before long.
"Then there's nothing to be done. I'll instruct the other officers to stand by."
"Right."
As she walked back with Zhang Liao, Lü Bu found her thoughts drifting to Han Yeong, who had turned against her adoptive father.
'Han Yeong...'
She showed nothing of it, yet he occupied her mind more than she cared to admit. A man of the same frontier stock as herself, who nonetheless stood to shield the common people. And even with her lethal martial prowess on full display before his eyes, not a flicker of color had left his face.
Even Ding Yuan, when the two of them had first met, had gone visibly grim at the sight of the slaughtered tribesmen she left heaped before him. Lü Bu spared no interest for anyone who was not a formidable warrior in his own right—yet Han Yeong, strangely, lingered in her mind.