The Scheme (3)
"So you are the envoy sent by the Colonel of the Vanguard?"
"Yes, General Who Pacifies the West. My name is Xiahou Dun."
Into the command tent walked the ash-gray-haired woman I had met once before in Cao Cao's company, and she clasped fist to palm in salute. A hefty broad-bladed dao hung at her hip.
By years, Xiahou Dun was my senior; but she was a junior officer with no proper rank to her name, and so I addressed her as a commander addresses a subordinate.
Had we met in private, the gap in our ages might well have earned her more deferential speech — but with Pang De, Yan Xing, and the rest of my officers standing at my side, that was a courtesy I could not extend her.
She was, after all, the first name that leapt to mind whenever one thought of Cao Cao's army.
And my gaze drifted, all on its own, toward her left eye.
The single eye that had become Xiahou Dun's very emblem.
In both the official Records and the Romance, she loses that eye in battle against Lu Bu's army; the circumstances, however, differ.
In the Romance, during the campaign to subdue Lu Bu, an arrow loosed by Cao Xing — one of the Eight Elite Generals — strikes her left eye. She rips the shaft free with a roar — "This was formed of my father's essence and my mother's blood. How could I dare treat it carelessly?!" — crushes the torn-out eyeball between her teeth, and cuts Cao Xing down with a single stroke.
It was one of the most jaw-dropping scenes of my childhood reading. Only as an adult, when I came to know the official history, did I learn that Xiahou Dun was less the blind berserker of legend than a remarkably capable quartermaster.
In the Records, a stray arrow took the eye — she was fighting Lu Bu's army to wrest back Yan Province when it flew in, and from that day on she was one-eyed.
Because of it, the troops took to calling the wounded Xiahou Dun "Blind Xiahou," and she despised the epithet so thoroughly that, the stories go, every mirror she caught her reflection in ended up hurled to the floor.
In truth it was a source of bitter shame for her — yet the Romance's embellishment of that wound did its part in remaking her into the very image of the valiant general who exemplified Cao Cao's army.
"Is something on my face, my lord? Why do you keep staring at me so...?"
"...No — my apologies. So. What brings you to me?"
"I hear that on account of the army Dong Zhuo has raised, you mean to withdraw to Liang Province."
"That's right."
"Before you withdraw, would you march north and pass through Hedong?"
Her message was the last thing I had expected.
"Hedong? Why?"
To return to Yongzhou it would be a straight march home from here; a swing through Hedong would only burn extra days.
"The Colonel says she has a gift waiting for you in Hedong, General."
A gift? What gift?
Xiahou Dun's words made no sense to me, and I could only tilt my head.
Ever since I had declared war on Ding Yuan in the middle of the banquet, word was that Cao Cao had heaped bribes upon the man and settled in at his elbow as one of his trusted intimates.
The scholar-officials and celebrated names around court sneered that her quick-witted maneuvering made her no different from the eunuchs; some sniped lower still, calling it precisely the career one would expect of a eunuch's get — a daughter, at that.
But even at a glance I could see she was biding her time to engineer Ding Yuan's assassination, exactly as she had once moved to do against Dong Zhuo in the original history, and so I thought nothing particular of her conduct.
My only thought was whether I ought to send her a letter, lest she go and kill Lü Boshe somewhere along the road.
...But why?
Why on earth would she send word telling me to go to Hedong?
Cao Cao was famous as the sharpest mind in all of Three Kingdoms; I could hardly dismiss the message out of hand.
...You never know. It might prove a variable — a welcome one, at that.
However suspicious I remained of Cao Cao's game, our supply trains could easily absorb a detour through Hedong. For the time being, I gave my assent.
It was around this time, with Han Yeong's army and Ding Yuan's locked in wary standoff after their first violent clash, that Wang Yun — who had never once sensed the treacherous ambition smoldering in Ding Yuan and had thrust the man forward with all his might — shut himself up in his residence, doing nothing but reproach himself.
He drank to soothe the bitterness in his chest, and his eyes had gone gaunt and hollow.
...Ding Yuan. And I trusted you...
He had judged that Ding Yuan — a fellow son of Bingzhou, a man who had guarded the realm against the fierce bandits of the northern frontier — could breathe fresh vigor into the rotting, crumbling Han and raise it upright again.
Ding Yuan had rooted out the chiefs of the Ten Attendants and protected the young Emperor's person besides; Wang Yun's faith had been bedrock-solid.
True, Han Yeong had led the destruction of the murderous Dong Zhuo, annihilated the rebel host, and steadied the people — but his father was Han Sui, a man who had once raised arms against the state.
Luoyang's senior officials, who judged men by pedigree and background alone, trusted him not at all, insisting that one who harbored such sinister designs was merely feigning obedience to the throne.
Grand General He Jin, too, had granted office only to pacify the endlessly rebellious Liang Province, and had never placed his trust in them.
Wang Yun, who prized integrity above any man alive, had for those very reasons refused the proposal of Fa Yan — once his dearest friend — and lent his strength to Ding Yuan instead.
That Ding Yuan's soldiers had committed that atrocity at Mengjin was, in part, because Grand General He Jin had ordered it.
And so Wang Yun had believed that, with men like himself at Ding Yuan's side to guide him, the man would become a capable servant of the Han house — a true counterweight to Han Yeong.
But—
The real traitor had been someone else entirely.
The axe you trusted, as the saying goes, bites into your own heel. Ding Yuan, having seized control of the army with scattered wealth, bared his treachery and vowed to set a new Emperor on the throne; and it was Han Yeong alone who stood against that ambition, waging a ferocious and bloody war to smother it.
Wang Yun, who had lent his hand to a traitor without ever meaning to and now had no face to show the late Emperor, bowed his head deep.
Just then, from beyond the door, drifted the sweet, silken voice of his adopted daughter — the beauty celebrated as the fairest in all Luoyang.
"Father. Colonel of the Central Army Yuan Shao and Colonel of the Vanguard Cao Cao have come to call."
"...Yuan Shao, and Cao Cao?"
Both belonged to the same Clear Stream faction, and he had once kept a fair measure of friendly commerce with them.
But Yuan Shao had been at odds with him since he threw in with Ding Yuan, and with Cao Cao relations had cooled noticeably after she entered the service of a man whose treason now lay bare.
Yuan Shao, he had heard, was due to depart for Jizhou the very next day.
Have they come to pay a last farewell?
But knowing the pair's exceptional gifts and the weight of their houses, Wang Yun could not very well turn them away at the door.
"Show them in."
Thereupon, ushered in by the lovely young woman — a beauty so exquisite the word peerless hardly covered it — Yuan Shao and Cao Cao entered.
"I trust you have been well, Intendant of Henan."
"It has been far too long, Lord Wang Yun."
"...What business have you two with me?"
...Hm. A ruin of a man.
So Cao Cao appraised him in silence. Wang Yun's face, worn down by shame, had gone gaunt — and no wonder.
It had been none other than Wang Yun who stood before the court officials and recommended Ding Yuan — the butcher of the traitors — as the next Grand General.
But Cao Cao spared him no sympathy.
Because of that recommendation, Yuan Shao — who had her own eye on the Grand General's seat — had gnashed her teeth half to pieces.
For all that he styled himself a loyal minister of the Han and had kept the Ten Attendants in check, he had trusted in nothing more than a shared hometown — and pushed into power a wolf that meant to swallow the state whole.
"We have come today because there is a proposal we wish to lay before the Intendant of Henan."
"...A proposal?"
"At this moment Ding Yuan has taken a crushing defeat at the General Who Pacifies the West's hands and lost a vast number of men. Drunk on thoughts of vengeance, his attention has wandered — and the eyes he keeps on the imperial palace have thinned."
"...What is it you are trying to say?"
"Move in secret, Your Honor, and petition His Majesty under imperial edict to enfeoff His Highness the Prince of Chenliu as Prince of Fufeng and dispatch the prince to the new fief."
"Wh-what was that?!"
At Cao Cao's outrageous composure, Wang Yun started so violently that the winecup dropped from his hand.
"Wh-what nonsense is this?! Enfeoff the Prince of Chenliu as Prince of Fufeng — and pack the prince off to some other fief entirely?!"
The sheer absurdity of it drove the wine from Wang Yun's head at a stroke.
"Precisely what I said."
But where Wang Yun reeled, Cao Cao's manner remained cold to the bone.
Ding Yuan's army had chased hard after Han Yeong's forces only to be routed, losing men by the thousand. As a result, the troops garrisoned in Luoyang had been summoned back to the war camps, and the stewardship of the capital had gone threadbare.
That the city, starved of officers to keep its peace, had been forced to take Cao Cao — a daughter of Luoyang's own gentry — into employ was proof enough.
"Enfeoff the Prince of Chenliu as Prince of Fufeng and send the prince away to that fief, and the throne can never be swapped out by Ding Yuan's hand."
The late Emperor Ling had left only two of his blood: Liu Bian and Liu Xie. Were even one of them to leave the capital — to slip from Ding Yuan's grasp — then even if the Son of Heaven were replaced, the Han could never be reduced to a puppet realm that moved at Ding Yuan's bidding.
Cao Cao walked Wang Yun through the details and the full chain of events.
"This is the only moment at which the altars of state can be kept from passing out of Han hands."
If Han Yeong prevailed, there would be nothing left to wish for — but Ma Chao, one of the key generals of Liang Province, had been wounded in her clash with Lu Bu, and for all that she had won that duel decisively, she had not taken the field in earnest since.
Better, then, to strike while Ding Yuan — convinced he held the palace wholly in his fist — had let his vigilance crumble: retitle the Prince of Chenliu as Prince of Fufeng, and slip the prince clean out of Luoyang.
Ding Yuan's influence, for all his designs on the throne, reached no farther than Sili and Bingzhou. Every other region lay beyond his grasp — Yongzhou, above all.
"...But why Fufeng Commandery, of all places?"
If the object was merely to keep the Son of Heaven from being replaced on Ding Yuan's order, why not simply send the prince home to Chenliu, the fief already held? Why re-enfeoff the child as Prince of Fufeng and change the destination at all? Wang Yun could not make sense of it.
"In Yan Province there is no warlord with the strength to stand against Ding Yuan. The only one in all the realm who can face him is the single man in Liang Province."
"Then... don't tell me—"
Only now did Wang Yun grasp what Cao Cao was driving at.
"Yes. Precisely that. I intend to place the Prince of Chenliu under the protection of Han Yeong, the General Who Pacifies the West."
Han Yeong was already waging open war on Ding Yuan rather than let the throne change hands; from where Wang Yun stood, he would have no one else to turn to.
Well, he leans on Han Yeong only because there is nowhere left to lean. Whether that old plank of a man will ever truly trust him is another matter altogether.
For now, this was the best move on the board.
"...And yet — is His Majesty not under watch?"
"The hands currently watching His Majesty and the Prince of Chenliu are few. Leave the manipulation to me, and it is a simple thing to turn the eyes of Ding Yuan's soldiers elsewhere and arrange even a brief, secret audience with His Majesty."
Ding Yuan, for all his greed for gold, was a simple creature.
Cao Cao had plied him with bribes and fed him a steady drip of intelligence from around Luoyang, and Ding Yuan had taken to her at once, keeping her close and counting her a favorite.
Having won that favor, Cao Cao set about hunting for cracks inside Ding Yuan's army.
And found one, glaring: with no one left to oversee the situation in Luoyang, the capital could respond to nothing quickly.
Ding Yuan's defeat at Han Yeong's hands had dragged his soldiers back to the camps, and Cao Cao had marked the very moment when Luoyang's iron vigilance first went porous.
Her plan was to scatter his attention first — proposing to Ding Yuan that a different man be named Administrator of Hedong.
A man whose gaze was fixed on the Emperor, the Prince of Chenliu, and the great personages of the court would never spare a thought for so humble a post.
Had it been Dong Zhuo, he would have used her, but never favored her — never once stopped watching her.
Of course, had Ding Yuan himself not lost to Han Yeong's army, he would never have recalled the very troops that had been guarding the Emperor... but there it was.
"...Tell me, then. Did you enter Ding Yuan's service for this — for this very moment?"
"I did."
Wang Yun straightened where he sat, awed in spite of himself by her composure.
Some of the Clear Stream men had denounced Cao Cao with real venom — she who had bought Ding Yuan's confidence with bribes — snarling that eunuch blood never washed out.
Even Wang Yun, who had rated her extraordinary talent and admirable character highly, had not managed to keep the disappointment out of his heart.
Frankly, it was laughable.
The very men who had raised up Ding Yuan's hand out of fear of Han Yeong now denounced another to hide their own shameful faces, and indulged their disappointment as they pleased.
But Cao Cao had been watching for her chance — for the Han's sake — more faithfully than any of them.
The chance to strike the back of the traitor's skull — the man who repaid grace with enmity...
The world knew her best by the epithet Hero of Chaos. But this was Cao Cao Mengde — the able minister of a well-governed age.
For the peace of the imperial house, she had made the best choice there was to make.