Subjugating the Rebels (3)
In the heart of a battlefield where the sun beat down with a stinging glare, Ma Chao's spear flashed and swept through the enemy ranks like a wave.
The death screams of the rebels rang out across the field, the reek of blood hung so thick it seemed to tremble in the air, and blood-soaked corpses began to blanket the plain.
Amid all that merciless slaughter, Ma Chao's white-blonde hair blazed brighter still beneath the glaring sun, radiant and resplendent.
Watching her from my distant post in the central army as she displayed a martial prowess beyond all comparison, I found a single term surfacing in my mind.
Match for Ten Thousand Men.
A phrase for one whose cunning and valor were so extraordinary that he could stand alone against ten thousand. In the Three Kingdoms era, the two who bore that title were Guan Yu and Zhang Fei.
Those spoken of as a Match for Ten Thousand became the very yardstick by which the strength of later generals was measured — so much so that a separate idiom, "the Valor of Guan and Zhang," exists for weighing men against the pair.
And beyond those two, history held no shortage of figures who could have crossed weapons with Guan Yu and Zhang Fei without yielding an inch.
The most celebrated example was Ma Chao, who in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms fought Zhang Fei to a perfect standstill in single combat.
Even Cao Cao, who had crushed Yuan Shao and seized hegemony over the realm, passed this judgment upon witnessing Ma Chao's command and martial might:
Zhuge Liang, too, rated her extraordinarily highly, saying she might ride neck-and-neck with Zhang Fei and contend for the vanguard.
The Ma Chao before my eyes, though, was far younger than the one who had once held her own against Zhang Fei — her experience and her art still unripe — yet there she was, cutting a matchless swathe through the Qiang soldiers whose savage bravery was the terror of the frontier.
White-blonde hair streaming, Ma Chao rode her white steed through the enemy lines like a cutting gale. With every sweep of her spear, enemy soldiers dropped where they stood, helpless to resist, and not even the officers commanding the rebel host could bar her way. Our own soldiers, letting out cries of awe at the prowess of the woman at their head, felt their morale soar of its own accord and followed hard on her heels in a fervent tide.
The Qiang soldiers, hardened by Xiliang's brutal frontier, were for the most part inured to the cold and valiant to a man. But for all that, this army was nothing more than a patchwork host, a coalition of rival warlords thrown together. These were men whose one true passion was seizing what belonged to others to line their own purses. Bandits who plundered the common folk as a matter of daily routine would never have drilled themselves in the formations needed to hold back a valiant general worth a thousand men on horseback.
"You damned bitch, I'll— kghk!!"
"S-Stop!! Aaaaagh!!"
"What, that's all you've got?!"
Each time a frigid gleam flashed from the point of Ma Chao's spear, more soldiers dropped screaming from their saddles, and those who fell met an end beneath the blunt hooves churning behind her — bodies ground into the mud, bones shattered to fragments.
Nothing about it looked like the work of a general who had only just celebrated her coming-of-age rite — it was a beast streaking across the battlefield to fall upon a flock of sheep.
"E-Eek!!"
"A m-monster!! Kghk!!"
WHAM!!
She brought her spear down across the neck of the soldier who had shrieked the word and flung his body sailing far across the field.
"Who're you calling a monster? You're the ones who're too damn weak."
At these vermin — priding themselves on their strength while they stripped the people of everything they owned — she spat a cold, cutting sneer. For in the Qiang she saw beasts wearing human faces, and the sight settled a thought in her mind: had her own family taken one wrong step, they might well have ended up among that pack.
The eunuchs known as the Ten Attendants clutched power in their hands while the Emperor drowned himself in luxury and pleasure, and the state rotted from the head down. Her family bore the name of a great Han lineage, yet had been too poor to secure even a respectable title — her father had made his living felling timber. They too had possessed nothing to lean on but the strength of their own arms, and one misstep could have seen them joining the Qiang rebels who defied the Han, becoming bandits who used that strength to strip the people of all they had.
In that sense, Ma Chao was grateful to Han Yeong. She had no idea how he had come to know her family, but it was Han Yeong who had asked Han Sui to swear an oath of brotherhood with her father — and thanks to him, the fate of joining the rebellion had passed the Ma family by.
Han Yeong's really watching me... isn't he?
Which was exactly why she had something to prove: that Han Yeong's choice — the Ma family over the great houses of the western frontier, clans like Beigong Boyu's — had not been wrong. Not by a hair.
She flicked the blood from her spear in one sharp motion, and it dropped in dark beads to the earth. Driving forward in the Arrowhead Formation — a wedge that punched through a single point like a loosed arrow — the cavalry shattered the Qiang lines and rode them down without mercy.
"B-Block that bitch, now!!"
Beigong Boyu whipped up his sword in desperation, feeding soldiers into her path in a frantic bid to stem the tide. The infantry swarmed close and thrust as one at the flanks of Ma Chao's horse — their scheme being to drag the raging woman out of her saddle. But the moment Ma Chao's spear swept through a single arc, those brittle spearheads burst apart like shards of glass, and with their weapons gone to powder her horse reared, hooves hammering down on the men frozen where they stood.
That's a Sweat-blood Horse too, if I remember right?
A breed kin to the Red Hare — it would not carry a thousand li in a single day, but like any great steed forged in the harsh wilds, its temper was violently fierce and its endurance superb. And like a clever horse that chooses its own master, it moved as a single body with its rider, breaking the enemy formation apart.
I could only marvel. Save for the times she had pounded me like a sandbag, I had almost never witnessed her martial arts on a true battlefield. Her name had told me she could fight to a degree, but for a girl still far short of twenty to deal out unbroken slaughter among whole companies of soldiers like this was beyond anything I had imagined.
The incoming volleys of arrows, too — her horse swerved away from them on its own instinct, or Ma Chao batted them out of the air with her spear.
So this is the level it takes to be called a Match for Ten Thousand?
It struck me all at once — Ma Chao had once beaten my uncle and Yan Xing.
In the last battle, maybe I should have asked for Ma Chao to take command of the night raid in my uncle's place?
I had predicted we would seize the upper hand early on through her martial prowess, and the rebels, seemingly crushed beneath the momentum, were indeed overwhelmed again and again. Even so, a gap of more than double in numbers could not simply be ignored, and bit by bit the ferocity of Ma Chao's charge began to ebb. A girl who had only just come of age could hardly have infinite stamina — and the Qiang had strength in reserve.
...I expected as much.
To Ma Chao I had given this instruction: if Qiang soldiers came up from the rear to reinforce the lines against her vanguard, she was not to force a breakthrough — only to draw as many eyes toward herself as she could. With a genius for commanding troops to match her martial arts, that would be no great burden.
And the ones who would drive the decisive blow into the rebels in the window while they floundered, thrown into disarray by Ma Chao's prowess—
—were the separate detachment.
"Goddamn it!! I knew she had made a name for herself as the Splendid Ma Chao, but I never dreamed she would be this—!!"
His disdain for Ma Chao on account of her youth had proven a costly mistake. Her martial skill, stronger than anything he had anticipated, had knocked the wind out of his army's momentum, but once he funneled more troops into the vanguard the front had settled into a tense standoff. The rebels fought tooth and nail, yet all they had managed was to check Ma Chao's furious advance.
A valor that common soldiers could never hope to lay hands on. She was, it seemed, every inch the descendant of Ma Yuan, the Han's General Who Calms the Waves.
His thirty thousand had slammed headlong into the enemy's fifteen, and the soldiers now standing at his own side scarcely numbered twenty thousand.
That she should display such monstrous prowess despite having barely set foot on a battlefield since coming of age turned Beigong Boyu's marrow to ice. He had faced Ma Teng himself during the previous assault on Jincheng, but even that had not raised gooseflesh like this.
Against the savage Qiang warriors, Ma Chao showed not the slightest flicker of fear, butchering each oncoming foe with a single stroke.
...Forget taking her alive. She dies!!
The dark design he had cherished — bewitched by the face celebrated as the finest in Xiliang, he had meant to break her and take her for his concubine — scattered like mist the instant he witnessed that terrifying valor. A general so young she had yet to reach her physical prime. He feared the scourge she would become, and so he had to put her in the ground by any means necessary.
"Alive or dead, it makes no difference!! Kill Ma Chao — whatever it takes!!"
"Yes, sir!!"
He was on the point of committing still more troops into the churning melee when—
"Sir — we have a crisis!!"
Just then a rebel soldier came tearing up to Beigong Boyu on horseback.
"Wh-What is it?! Don't tell me Ma Chao has cut her way here?!"
"No, sir! An enemy detachment has appeared on our right!"
"A detachment, you say?!"
By his scouts' reports, the bulk of the enemy's strength had already shown itself on the field. And yet a separate detachment? They should not have had the men to spare...
"How many?!"
"Th-That is..."
The soldier, like a man who had witnessed something beyond believing, could not readily open his mouth — and Beigong Boyu, his temper boiling over at the maddening display, drove him on.
"Out with it! What in the blazes are you waiting for?!"
"Th-Thirty thousand, sir!!"
"Wh-What did you say?!"
At the word thirty thousand, a dead silence hung in the air for an instant.
"Th-That makes no sense?! The men they marched here with number a mere twenty thousand at most!! How in the world can an army of thirty thousand appear out of thin air?"
This was what his scouts, sent out to track their movements and sound out their strength, had brought back. Above all, no single man — Han Sui least of all — could field a host to rival the combined armies of Liangzhou's warlords. Unless sorcery had made soldiers spring up from the earth, it was simply impossible.
"B-But..."
"Out of my way!! I will go and see with my own eyes!!"
Shoving through his guards, Beigong Boyu pushed toward the right flank.
"It cannot be..."
Hoofbeats rolled like thunder through the ground, and behind them a thick pall of yellow dust swallowed the horizon.
"BEIGONG BOYU!! I've come for your head!!"
At its head rode Ma Teng, leading the detachment in a headlong charge to cut Beigong Boyu down. However great the distance still between them, the roar came through crisp and clear — and at the sound of it, the color drained from Beigong Boyu's face, leaving him ghost-pale.