The Scheme (4)
Wang Yun chose to accept Cao Cao's proposal.
"I was the one who was wrong...."
Every judgment he had handed down without ever seeing to another man's depths — all while preening himself as the one true loyal subject of the Han — now came back to him as regret. Ding Yuan, whom he had taken for a loyal minister of Han, was a traitor bent on toppling the altars of state, while Han Yeong, whom he had kept at arm's length, and Cao Cao, who had played the lackey at Ding Yuan's side, were the true loyalists after all. For a man who called himself a pillar of loyalty, his eyes had been far too poor. He was ashamed to so much as raise his own head.
Wang Yun agonized a moment, then turned.
"Diaochan."
"Yes, Father."
"There is something I would ask of you. Will you hear it?"
The woman celebrated as the First Beauty of the Capital tilted her head, studying her adoptive father's grave face.
"...Why, Mengde?"
On the way out of Wang Yun's house, where the plan to keep a new Emperor from being enthroned had just been laid before her, Yuan Shao put the question to her unreadable friend.
"Whatever do you mean, Benchu?"
When Cao Cao deflected with a jest, Yuan Shao asked her outright.
"What on earth did you see in the General Who Pacifies the West, that you would help him even at the risk of your own neck?"
Yuan Shao had long been curious about the mind of Cao Cao, who had shown her brilliance from the days they played house as children. She had met Han Yeong at Cao Cao's request — the two of them thick as thieves since earliest girlhood, and close still — and over the course of their conversation she had quietly taken his measure, analyzing and appraising everything about him.
For a warlord who had swallowed the ownerless wilds of Liang and Yong Provinces, he radiated precious little commanding presence. His looks were by no means poor — though neither did they set Luoyang's women's hearts aflutter the way her half-brother's did; sworn enemy though that man was, his face alone could make the capital's maidens swoon. And judging by his speech and his frame, he did not appear to possess any extraordinary learning, nor any iron-hard martial strength.
Granted, for a man raised on a frontier where the foreign tribes ran wild, his manners and character leaned rather toward the proper.
"Perhaps he excels at winning men over, and his character may be beyond reproach — but on the surface, I confess he left little impression on me...."
She was not like Ding Yuan, who brushed him off as a green whelp on account of his youth, nor like Yuan Shu, who scorned him for his frontier birth alone; even so, Yuan Shao could find nothing in the man that warranted high regard. Her part in introducing him to the court's officialdom, too, had been nothing more than a lever for checking Ding Yuan, who had for a time been fattening under Wang Yun's patronage. She had not come away favorably impressed, and so she bore him no particular goodwill.
Cao Cao answered the question with perfect calm.
"I merely made the best choice."
"The best choice?"
"The best choice for protecting the altars of state."
Having met Han Yeong, Cao Cao had let her true colors show, and with her own eyes she had watched the tyranny of the savage Ding Yuan unfold. When Han Yeong hurled his wine cup to the floor at the banquet and chose the path of defiance, she had for her part slipped beneath Ding Yuan's wing and waited for an opening. Had Ding Yuan crushed Han Yeong, she meant to turn his greedy nature against him — borrowing one of Wang Yun's priceless treasured blades, lulling him into carelessness, and striking for his throat.
"But Han Yeong's crushing victory over Ding Yuan's host had changed everything."
Fire attacks and all, outnumbered as he was, Han Yeong had overwhelmed troops hardened by real campaigning against savage tribesmen. To be sure, the absence of any officers fit to command those troops, and the fact that they had never once been drilled properly, numbered among the chief causes of the rout. And had it not been for Lü Bu — who charged onto the field even with her ties to her adoptive father all but severed — the war upon which the Emperor's fate hung would have ended then and there, with Han Yeong's army carrying off Ding Yuan's head and entering Luoyang in triumph.
Instead of a head, however, Han Yeong had annihilated the bulk of the host, and Ding Yuan, to refill his ranks, had called part of the garrison he kept in Luoyang out to his camps. The capital's defenses had thinned accordingly.
"A fine chance to spirit the Prince of Chenliu out of the city."
Emperors who lost their thrones rarely met good ends, so Empress Dowager He — who stood behind Emperor Shao — would surely consent if Wang Yun, the Intendant of Henan who administered the capital, made the proposal. Ding Yuan's weakness lay in having cooped himself up on the frontier for so long that his vision had narrowed to a sliver; a move made inside the capital was not one he could answer in time.
"If some brilliant strategist stood at Ding Yuan's elbow to prop him up, a plan like this would never fly."
Cao Cao could not have known it, but Zhang Yang, for all that he filled the strategist's role, had faked his own death and was in no position to show his face openly before the palace. Not that the man had any real gift for plotting strategy — only political cunning.
"Not that it will stop Ding Yuan from running riot with the Son of Heaven in his grasp."
Once Han Yeong — the only man commanding a great army — drew his forces out, there would be no one left to check the tyranny of a Ding Yuan drunk on his own arrogance.
Yuan Shao pressed her friend once more.
"Do you trust that he will never show ambition of his own?"
If Han Yeong became protector to the Prince of Chenliu, then he too would hold a pretext of legitimacy — not so brazen as Ding Yuan's, who held the Emperor himself, but a pretext all the same. Shelter an imperial prince of the royal blood, and talents would come flocking like clouds to court ties with her. And should a Han Yeong grown hungry for power stand against Ding Yuan and raise the Prince of Chenliu up as a second emperor, the realm itself might well be torn in two. Skeptical as she was, such possibilities gnawed at Yuan Shao.
In fairness, she had scarcely ever met the man; one might call her reaction the more sensible of the two.
"Would it not be better to entrust her to Mengzhuo, who is settled in Yan Province?"
She did not trust this Han Yeong overmuch, and so she asked, ever so casually, whether her friend of many years — Zhang Miao, the warlord of Yan Province — might not be the safer keeper.
"Set your mind at ease. He's not that kind of man. And Mengzhuo's strength could never stand up to Ding Yuan as things stand, could it?"
Liang Province, beyond the court's writ, was dangerous enough, but Yan Province was every bit as perilous — a land where the Yellow Turbans rampaged at intervals, and the Clear Stream scholars serving as its civil governors were hardly better than packs of wolves. And Zhang Miao had never laid a foundation capable of standing against Ding Yuan the way Han Yeong's had.
Cao Cao, who had taken Han Yeong's part and thrown her weight behind him, cast her mind back to their first meeting only days before. Curious about the warlord who had brought the lawless land of Liang Province — a wilderness beyond the court's reach where warlords ran rampant — into his grasp, and who had then bested Dong Zhuo to seize Yong Province as well, she had plied him with questions of every stripe.
Certain of them, naturally, had been pure mischief — when, precisely, do you mean to marry? — but even that was calculation: a lever for prying loose his wariness. She alternated between the military and the personal, and then, with her final question, she dropped the one that mattered.
What righteous cause had he taken up arms for? Loyalty to the house of Han — or private greed?
Whichever of the two he chose, Cao Cao would have kept a careful guard where Han Yeong was concerned. Loyalty to the Han might sound admirable, but either answer meant a man prepared to wade through civil war to have his way.
But Han Yeong had chosen the peace of the people he governed.
He fought, he said, because only by crushing the rebels and steadying the hearts of the realm could the lives of the people in his own lands be made better.
Cao Cao liked that answer.
Hearing his cause, she judged him no man to bring chaos down upon the age. There were her reasons for entrusting Liu Xie to him as well: that while all others trembled in helplessness, he alone had stood against Ding Yuan; that during the chaos of the Ten Attendants, when everyone scrambled to snatch up the Emperor, he alone had moved with the people of Luoyang in his thoughts. Small things, perhaps — but she had watched him back his words with deeds, unlike the glib-mouthed officials of Luoyang, and that was why she trusted him.
"If he takes the Prince of Chenliu under his wing and drags the world into ruin after all, then I simply misjudged the man."
And so she resolved to give him a gift. Whether he used Liu Xie as a gift or thought of her as so much baggage was, of course, his affair.
"And in any case, the world will never abandon this Cao Mengde."
The most famed physiognomist under heaven, Xu Shao, had read her face and pronounced her a capable minister in a reign of peace, a treacherous hero in an age of chaos — words that meant that however the world might turn, she would never be thrown away. So Cao Cao moved, and moved boldly.
To keep Ding Yuan from setting up a new Son of Heaven and hollowing the country into a puppet state, the meticulous plan to spirit Liu Xie out to Fufeng Commandery was set in motion.
Cao Cao held a feast in honor of the officers and men seconded to Ding Yuan's command, while her own personal guards took over the soldiers who watched the Emperor. Wang Yun, an incorruptible loyalist who served the house of Han with blind devotion, moved at once — if only to dodge the slander that he had colluded with Ding Yuan.
Granted an audience with Liu Bian, Wang Yun laid out Cao Cao's plan and petitioned that Liu Xie be invested as Prince of Fufeng.
Liu Bian had completed his rite of manhood, yet still green and wanting in experience, he cut a frail figure; but he cherished his little sister, and in that audience with Wang Yun he resolved to send her — his half-sister, the Prince of Chenliu — to Fufeng Commandery, and issued the decree under his own hand. Empress Dowager He, caring little what became of herself, consented as well, if only to keep her son the Son of Heaven alive. Perhaps because she had lost her brother through her own error, she seemed drained of all spirit, and had grown visibly gaunt.
It was an arbitrary decree, issued without a word to the court's officials while Ding Yuan's eye was fixed wholly on his war with Han Yeong — but it came under the sanction of the Emperor, who in the state was as heaven, and not a soul alive could defy it.
Only the senior officials had attended Ding Yuan's banquet, so the lesser functionaries knew nothing of his ambition. The junior officials and low clerks, ignorant that he meant to swap out the Emperor altogether, took it that the Son of Heaven was coldly dispatching his own sister to the restive lands of Liang Province to nail down his power.
Liu Xie, whose posting had changed without warning to Fufeng Commandery, was taken by the hands of Wang Yun's trusted aides and the other palace attendants and set into a carriage bound for Hedong before she could so much as ask her elder brother Liu Bian the reason. It was a disguise: she rode in the same carriage as Wang Yi, the man newly appointed Governor of Hedong.
The soldiers Ding Yuan kept in Luoyang naturally moved to inspect the procession — but Cao Cao declared that she would answer for it and waved them through, and so the escape went off without a hitch.
A few days later, word reached even Ding Yuan — still locked in standoff with Han Yeong's army — that the Prince of Chenliu had been invested as Prince of Fufeng and had already departed for the new fief.
Ding Yuan, whose spirits had lifted at the news of Han Yeong's withdrawal, of course exploded.
"Wh-what did you say?! Prince of Fufeng?!"
Ding Yuan and Zhang Yang had meant to depose the now-grown Liu Bian and set the young Liu Xie upon the throne, that they might knead power in their own fists; they could only stand there dumbfounded.
"Yes!! The imperial decree and the patent of office have already gone out!! The Prince of Fufeng has already departed the palace!!"
Ding Yuan had intended, once his bout with Han Yeong was finished, to bring his army to bear on the court and wring the title of Grand General out of it.
"How could that spineless Son of Heaven make so bold a decision?! Someone has surely been at his ear! And where in blazes was Cao Cao — the very woman charged with guarding the palace grounds?!"
Zhang Yang, face still masked behind its veil of white silk, was incandescent, and the soldier answered in a trembling voice.
"Th-that is... General Cao Cao was often away, saying she would honor the troops' toil with a feast... and the procession bound for Hedong — she let it pass without inspection...."
At the soldier's report, Ding Yuan remembered the correspondence concerning the official lately named Governor of Hedong.
"I've been played for a fool!!"
Liu Xie had slipped out of the city hidden in that man's very company!!
Ding Yuan's eyes went so bloodshot they seemed ready to burst, and his rage boiled over.
"Seize that woman Cao Cao — this instant—!!!"
His plan in ruins, the howling Ding Yuan sent for Cao Cao — but she had already hung her official tally upon the city gate and fled for Yan Province to throw herself upon the protection of her friend Zhang Miao.
"Hahahaha—!! A pity I won't get to see that old man's face!!"
Laughing as though ten years' weight had fallen from her at a stroke, Cao Cao — under the escort of her cousin Xiahou Yuan — was already clear of Luoyang, spurring her horse for Yan Province. Yuan Shao, Cao Cao's dearest friend, had likewise gone off to Ji Province, where the faction loyal to her awaited.
Ding Yuan, who had stared at nothing but the battlefield through his narrow, jaundiced eyes, had taken a proper knife in the back from the very officials of Luoyang he so habitually despised.