The Trap (2)
"Do not let a single one of them escape!!"
"Ride this momentum, seize Han Yeong himself, and win your glory!!"
Ding Yuan's great host thundered after Han Yeong's army as it fled toward its camp.
It was, oddly enough, a remarkably simple thing to make an army that had never learned to move in concert beat with a single heart: all it took was a beaten enemy running for its life. Soldiers blinded by hunger for merit, men greedy for the wealth and grain of the Liang Province forces — troops in the grip of every appetite imaginable — chased their quarry like beasts stripped of all reason.
Partway through the pursuit a stretch of forest came into view on the open plain, but Ding Yuan's army, certain there would be no ambush this time either, swept past without a flicker of suspicion.
"Bwahaha!! After them!!"
Ding Yuan burst into wild laughter as he drove his black horse forward, sneering at Han Yeong's army as it fled spinelessly — a far cry from the valor the rumors had promised.
'So the famed heroes of Liang Province are all hollow names. What manner of heroes break so easily and run like that?'
Not that the man who had cast Lu Bu aside over idle rumors drifting through Luoyang was in any position to talk — Ding Yuan bent everything that reached his ears to fit his own willful conclusions.
In Lu Bu's case, he had barred her from this battle entirely, blindly trusting those rumors out of fear she might amass influence capable of towering over him. And though Han Yeong had toppled Dong Zhuo himself, Ding Yuan dismissed the victory — won at barely twenty — as mere luck that had inflated the boy's reputation.
'Ride this momentum, take the whelp's head, snap the pride of that social-climbing Lu Bu — and the ministers at court will never so much as dream of defying me.'
The longer a man's years in service, the more he ought to leash his ambition. But Ding Yuan, seared by old memories of the court ministers sneering at him as a backwater frontier general, and by the way his rank and prestige had sunk under Lu Bu's shadow, hungered for a triumph more desperately than anyone alive. The feat of crushing Han Yeong's Liang Province forces in an overwhelming victory — and without Lu Bu's help. That alone filled the arrogant old warlord's head from edge to edge.
Sun Qing, riding at the very head of the pursuit, burned with the same fever for glory as his lord. He had no deep bond with Ding Yuan, but his hunger to earn merit and an official post let zeal run far ahead of caution.
'I will win my merit and my rank, whatever it takes!!'
He seethed with envy of Zhang Yan, who — a chieftain of the same Black Mountain Bandits — had been granted the court title of General of the Household Who Pacifies Rebellion on account of his unrivaled influence. He knew perfectly well that Zhang Yan's martial skill dwarfed his own, and the knowledge that he himself, despite holding an equal chieftain's rank, was stuck playing caretaker to Ding Yuan only fed the jealousy.
'For once standing in the vanguard — this is a golden opportunity to make my name!!'
Determined not to let the chance slip, Sun Qing lashed his reins and tore down the road, intent on claiming Yan Xing's head.
"There it is — Han Yeong's camp!!"
The camp rose into view ahead of Ding Yuan's army, its gates flung wide open — whether to admit Yan Xing's own vanguard, no one thought to ask.
"Quickly!! We're taking this camp as it stands!!"
Convinced that Han Yeong himself would be inside, Ding Yuan dug his heels into his horse's flanks, spurring the chase to even greater speed.
"...Something's off about this. I've thought so for a while now, but isn't it all a little too easy?"
"That's what I keep saying. Something about it stinks."
By Ding Yuan's high-handed order, Lu Bu's own men Wei Yue and Cheng Lian had been shoehorned into the army's organization for the sole purpose of managing its vast numbers. Slotting in Zhang Liao or Gao Shun instead might have served him far better, but the old tyrant had marched out deliberately shutting away every general of real military talent — for no reason but to burnish his own name.
Wei Yue and Cheng Lian, inserted into the order of battle as little more than glorified stewards of the host, felt a quiet dread gnawing at them despite the string of victories.
Ding Yuan's fortified camp.
"General Lu Bu!! Governor Ding is at this very moment pursuing Han Yeong's retreating forces!!"
At the messenger's report, several of the Eight Elite Cavalrymen clicked their tongues in open disappointment. But then, this camp held none but men who resented Ding Yuan, and there was no one left to rebuke them for it.
"Ah, damn it all! He'll be milking this one measly win for years!!"
"He's the one who ought to be getting routed and humiliated this time!!"
Hou Cheng and Song Xian spat on the ground in full view of everyone, venting their disgust at Ding Yuan's unbroken string of triumphs. Even Gao Shun, a man famed for enforcing discipline to the letter, did not stir to check their breach of military law — a measure of just how profound their resentment of their lord had grown.
'.......Something about this is wrong.'
Amid the chorus of grievances, Lu Bu alone felt a nagging unease she could not name; glancing sideways, she found Zhang Liao stroking her chin, deep in thought.
"What is it, Wenyuan?"
"...Nothing, General Fengxian. Only... something troubles me. Don't you think Han Yeong's army has been collapsing far too feebly?"
"......Honestly? That part's been bothering me too."
Han Yeong had repelled Dong Zhuo with a smaller host, and yet now he retreated feebly, time after time, without suffering any real losses. Even Lu Bu — never much of a thinker — had instinct enough, honed on battlefields, for that to reek of something.
How could an elite force that had bled against the northern tribes, just as they had, be beaten this easily? And Splendid Ma Chao — the general whose name thundered across the Central Plains — had not even taken the field? Perhaps Ding Yuan had simply been away from war too long and lost the feel for it; whatever the reason, Lu Bu felt anxious.
'.....It's getting under my skin.'
Something smelled rotten, but Ding Yuan had left her under strict orders to hold the camp. If she trusted nothing but her own gut and marched out, she would surely be punished for defying a direct command.
"Maybe I should ride out and take one look?"
"You must not!!"
The moment Lu Bu murmured it aloud, Zhang Liao cried out in objection.
"You know full well Governor Ding is watching you with suspicion right now. How could you possibly move troops on nothing but an unconfirmed feeling?"
It was true that Han Yeong's movements were unsettling — but if no real emergency materialized, Ding Yuan could seize upon exactly this as a pretext to do whatever he pleased to Lu Bu. Zhang Liao, whose loyalty belonged to Lu Bu long before it belonged to Ding Yuan, counseled that holding the camp was the wiser course.
"But Wenyuan — however much I can't stand him as a superior, he's still my adoptive father. He could be in danger out there. What kind of daughter leaves her father behind? And I'm worried about Wei Yue and Cheng Lian too."
Thus did Lu Bu blurt out words that made her sound more filial than any soul in the Three Kingdoms. For all the crude, coarse speech she wielded while hunting down tribes and bandits, she truly loved Ding Yuan as a father — the man who had taken her in and raised her. And she cherished Wei Yue and Cheng Lian of her own direct command far too much to simply abandon them.
Had Han Yeong witnessed the scene, he might well have been struck speechless by a cognitive dissonance so extreme that neither the official histories nor the Romance could contain it.
"I'll take a few dozen horsemen so no one spots us, and be back before anyone notices. If I happen to win a great merit while I'm out there, so much the better — it might wash away the suspicion that we're in league with Han Yeong's army, and Father might hold us in high regard once more."
With her martial prowess behind them, she declared, a few dozen riders were escort enough; there was no danger she could not cut down herself.
"......Haa."
Zhang Liao let out a long, troubled sigh. In Bing Province, Lu Bu's valor was the stuff of legend, and a childhood of hardship had forged a combative temper and a foul tongue to match; nearly everyone who met her for the first time shrank from her in fear. Yet the heart beneath — which Zhang Liao alone had come to know in their years together in Bing Province — was more guileless and tender than anyone's.
Some who glimpsed that side dismissed her as a simpleton. Zhang Liao saw it differently: Lu Bu was not dull — she was pure. The cruel world that scorned a frontier-born woman had taught her a measure of selfishness, true, but had she been raised in kinder soil, might she not have become a general more loyal to the realm than any other? Zhang Liao found something in that at once wistful and heartbreaking.
'...And it is because you are the way you are that I cannot bring myself to leave Ding Yuan's side.'
"Very well, General. In exchange, I am coming with you."
"...You too, Wenyuan?"
"Yes. With me beside you, I can rein you in before you overextend. General Gao Shun alone will suffice to hold this camp."
Zhang Liao was every bit Lu Bu's equal at leading troops and pressing an assault, and since Gao Shun commanded with iron rigor, he was the obvious choice to keep the camp.
"......You worry too much. Fine — let's go."
"Yes, General!"
Lu Bu and Zhang Liao mounted up and culled a few dozen riders from among the elite.
"You hold the camp. I'm just going to have a look — I'll be back before you know it."
Having entrusted the camp to Gao Shun and his peerless command, Lu Bu thundered away at the head of a few dozen cavalry, Zhang Liao at her side.
"Charge in!!"
Ding Yuan's army poured through the gates hard on Yan Xing's heels, intent on seizing the camp — and found not a single soldier of Han Yeong's inside. Nothing waited there but military stores, left sitting abandoned. Yan Xing, for his part, had never intended to hold it; he had simply galloped straight through and away.
The camp did hold, exactly as the scouts had reported, a staggering mountain of supplies. Like a sparrow that cannot pass a granary, Ding Yuan — his eyes swimming with greed at the sight of the heaped grain and the carts stacked with jars — began calculating on the spot.
'We'll haul all of this back to our own camp first, then resume the pursuit.'
It was, of course, nothing so vulgar as greed. His reasoning was impeccable: strip an enemy of its supply train and its grain, and a prolonged campaign becomes impossible — the foe can be annihilated in short order.
Having chased off Han Yeong's army and occupied the camp, Ding Yuan issued his orders for transporting the spoils.
"Sun Qing — stay on their tail! The rest of you, start moving the supplies!!"
"Yes, my lord!!"
Sun Qing shot off down the road after Yan Xing, hungry for an enemy commander's head, while Ding Yuan called a temporary halt to the pursuit.
"Haul every last supply back to our camp!!"
The rank and file, who had swallowed their resentment every time the orders flipped from 'pursue' to 'stop,' grumbled inwardly at their lord's greed-driven caprice — yet at the sight of all that heaped grain, a greed of their own came boiling up from within.
'This is far too much, isn't it? And they're abandoning every last bit of it?'
Xu Rong, who had trailed behind Ding Yuan in the pursuit, eyed the sheer quantity — far beyond what an army abandoning its position would plausibly leave behind — and doubt began to gnaw at him. Then something reached his nose: a rich, oily fragrance that stabbed at his nostrils.
"G-General!!"
A soldier sent to haul the grain sacks had hefted one, felt the greasy slip of it and its far-too-light weight, and cried out in alarm.
"What is it?"
"There isn't a single grain in the sacks, sir — they're stuffed with nothing but dry grass!!"
"And the jars are full of oil, not drinking water!!"
"What?! Dry grass?! And oil?!"
As the soldier's report and the scent grazing his nostrils confirmed it — oil — Xu Rong grasped the enemy's design at once, and his voice cracked as he shouted in dismay.
'...Don't tell me!?'
"We have to get out of here, now—!!"
But the warning never finished leaving his mouth. From the sky above, fire arrows came sheeting down like a sudden squall......
FWOOSH-CRACK!!
WHOOOOM—!!
The moment the arrows touched, raging flame erupted across the camp. Feeding on the oil spattered through the compound and the dry grass stuffed into every sack, the fire swallowed the timber palisades whole, shrouding the fortified camp in an instant.
Ringed in fire, Ding Yuan's soldiers began to waver.
"All forces — charge!!"
And as the flames leapt skyward, Han Yeong's troops — long since lying in wait within the forest on the plain — hurled themselves as one at Ding Yuan's army from the rear.