The Return (2)
"The Prince of Chenliu... ah, no, forgive me—the Prince of Fufeng. We really mustn't give chase."
"What do you mean, I can't!?"
Ding Yuan had been on the verge of assembling a pursuit force then and there to retake Liu Xie, who had fled to Hedong—but when Zhang Yang held him back, he demanded the reason.
"Now that he has left Luoyang under imperial decree, we have no legitimate pretext to begin with—and even were we to drag him home by force, we would have to cross blades with Han Yeong's army all over again."
Without granting Ding Yuan so much as a breath to object, Zhang Yang pressed on.
"Worse still, if we go on neglecting Luoyang, the worst-case scenario may yet come to pass and the Emperor himself will slip away. We must take this recent affair as our lesson and bring the capital under a far more complete grip."
It was only because the Emperor's guard had been stiffened that disaster had been averted. One small misstep, and the Emperor might have escaped Luoyang as well—leaving Ding Yuan's army stripped of even its pretext and branded a traitor before all the realm.
With his military strength as thin as it was, Ding Yuan had no choice but to forgo the chase and shore up his political footing instead.
"Damn it all...!!"
Ding Yuan set a bounty on Cao Cao—the woman who had smashed the back of his head and fled—and issued wanted orders to every commandery and county near Luoyang, but his response had come too late, and no word of any substance trickled back.
As for Wang Yun, there was only a gut suspicion without a shred of hard evidence, and so Ding Yuan considered doing away with the man outright—but the united objections of the court ministers stayed his hand in the end.
Wang Yun commanded the reverence of the Clear Stream faction and countless court officials besides, and enjoyed the Emperor's favor on top of it all. He was not a man to be touched rashly.
In the end, it was only Wang Yun's blameless aides who were put to death.
...Nothing goes my way.
He had been crushed in the battle against Han Yeong's army—the very battle meant to cement his standing with a glorious feat of arms—while Lu Bu, whom he had sought to keep down, had rescued him and parlayed it into higher rank and greater standing, her influence over the military swelling by the day.
Because of that defeat, his plundering of the common people had been brought to a halt, and he had been forced to raise the ranks of Lu Bu and the Eight Elite Cavalrymen—the very people he had treated so unjustly.
Worse yet, the Luoyang bureaucrats he had sneered at as idle armchair theorists had delivered a proper stab in the back. Watching his prestige sink lower by the day, Ding Yuan felt a deep unease gnawing at him.
If it has come to this, I must climb to the seat of Grand General—and quickly.
With Han Yeong withdrawn to Chang'an through his schemes, no one in Luoyang remained who could bar his path.
Ding Yuan hungered to seat himself at the very summit of the Han military hierarchy as Grand General, and to wield power absolute and unchecked.
Once Zhang Yang had withdrawn, Ding Yuan sat in his command tent, stewing in his fury.
"General."
Just then, one of his staff officers came to him.
"Zhang Yan of the Black Mountain Bandits, General of the Household of Henan, and Guo Tai of the White Wave Bandits have arrived at the head of a great host."
"Oh!! So they've finally come!! Show them in at once—!!"
Zhang Yan, a black band wrapped about his head, and Guo Tai, wearing a yellow one not unlike the Yellow Turbans, entered the tent.
Zhang Yan was the chieftain of the Black Mountain Bandits, a horde of exiled convicts and outlaws scraped together across Hebei whose notoriety rang across the land; Guo Tai was the chieftain who had rallied and united the remnants of the Yellow Turbans to found the White Wave Bandits.
He had won them over as allies with the lure of high office, coupled with a promise to grant them license to plunder the nearby cities—Luoyang alone excepted.
The very idea of summoning bandits into the capital to swell one's army laid bare just how deficient Ding Yuan's art of employing men truly was.
Zhang Yan had already received the post of General of the Household of Henan and a full pardon for his crimes.
Yet, as if to prove that human greed knows no bottom, he had been swept up in Ding Yuan's honeyed promises and now hungered for still higher office and greater power.
"Come in, come in!!"
"It has been a while, Governor of Bingzhou."
"You do intend to honor your promise to permit our plundering, I trust?"
"But of course! Once I ascend to Grand General, I promise each of you a lofty general's title within the military hierarchy!!"
Ding Yuan greeted them with a booming, braying laugh.
Truth be told, having lost his soldiers' hearts in the last battle, Ding Yuan privately ached to kill the pair on the spot and absorb their troops into his own.
But Zhang Yang had talked him down, warning that should he do so, no one alive would ever consent to work with him again.
With these men's strength behind me, the Han will fit neatly into the palm of my hand.
Set against the men before him now, Son Jing and Wang Fang—whom he had only lately taken under his command—were mere greenhorns.
Zhang Yan above all, who commanded Bingzhou's most formidable force at the head of a truly massive army, was one of the rare few to bear the epithet of Flying General, just as Lu Bu did.
The soldiers he led across Bingzhou and the whole of Hebei numbered well past a hundred thousand, and Ding Yuan was certain of it: the man's name carried weight across the realm, and his martial prowess outshone that of most any general alive.
After every twist and turn, I've finally made it here!!
For all the bone-chilling toil he had endured on the cold frontier, this was a country that had given him nothing in return—a feeble state batted about at the eunuchs' pleasure.
As if to reclaim the years squandered in his youth, the golden opportunity to seize the reins of the Han government had arrived at last.
"Then let us proceed to Luoyang and pay our respects at court."
"...Hold, if you would. I should like to refill the military stores we burned through on the road here by plundering the vicinity. Heavy snow falls within days, and replenishing would grow difficult."
Guo Tai announced, as casually as one might remark on the weather, his intention to sack the surrounding commanderies. Consumed supplies or no, the excuse was an unmistakable lie.
They had fought no long campaign and done nothing but march; there was no world in which their stores had been squandered to the point of crippling the army.
But Ding Yuan knew full well what the man truly wanted, and let it pass.
With Zhang Yan and Guo Tai's great host swelling his ranks, dispatching a pursuit force would cost him nothing; and even if the fugitives slipped the net, the bandits would line his pockets in gratitude for his silence over the plunder—profit far from trivial.
Just to be safe...
Unwilling to hand Han Yeong—a man who grated on his nerves enough already—even the pretext that Liu Xie represented, Ding Yuan permitted the excursion to Hedong, with a single condition attached.
"Do as you please. In exchange, should you come upon a procession bearing anyone of high station, do not kill them. Take them alive, whatever it costs. A figure of consequence to my great enterprise."
Liu Xie might very well end up dead otherwise, and so he had given Guo Tai fair warning beforehand.
"Mmmh, understood... Grand General."
Guo Tai, sweetening a title the man had not yet formally claimed, withdrew.
With a cheap smile playing on his lips, Guo Tai picked out a force from among the White Wave Bandits and set off to sack Hedong Commandery and replenish their stores.
"Li Le! Hu Cai! You two will go to Hedong Commandery and plunder us our supplies!!"
"At once!!"
Li Le and Hu Cai led the White Wave warriors off toward Hedong Commandery.
In a forest along the road to Hedong Commandery, a force lay in wait.
"What is that? Doesn't look like Ding Yuan's army. Bandits?"
…
"Answer me, will you? I only drew the short straw because you said you'd rather not be paired with Pang De."
Yan Xing voiced his displeasure at Xu Rong, who kept his silence through it all.
They had dug in here on Han Yeong's orders, poised to counterattack in case Ding Yuan sent a pursuit force after the fugitive Liu Xie—only for bandits in yellow headwraps to appear out of nowhere.
"...Ahem. They would be the White Wave Bandits. Brigands who operate out of Baiwagu, in Xihe Commandery, Bingzhou."
"Those men are the White Wave Bandits?"
Xu Rong, who had served as a military officer in the Sili region for many long years, needed only one look at the yellow headwraps and the shape of the host to know them.
"Brigands out of Bingzhou, come all this way?"
"The White Wave Bandits range far and wide, plundering all the way from Taiyuan Commandery in Bingzhou down to Hedong Commandery in Sili."
Unlike the Black Mountain Bandits, against whom the court had thrown up its hands entirely, unable to muster a host vast enough to subdue them, the White Wave Bandits were simply difficult to strike at short notice, and so their suppression had been shelved.
They too, if not the Black Mountain Bandits' equal in scale, roamed the treacherous terrain of Bingzhou as comfortably as their own backyard—a standing thorn in the court's side. A campaign to destroy them had been drawn up, then postponed again and again over the court's own internal affairs.
"Ding Yuan's men are nowhere in sight anyway. Shall we make do with these ones?"
Going by what Han Yeong and Jia Xu had said—scouts reported the White Wave Bandits and other brigand bands alike were to join Ding Yuan's army—he had given orders that any who showed themselves on the road home were to be destroyed.
"Well then. Let's see this talent of yours—the one that held our elite cavalry's charge at bay."
...Is he saddling this on me?
Xu Rong gave Yan Xing a faintly bemused look.
Han Yeong knew that Xu Rong's personal martial skill fell somewhat short of his other generals', but that he was a commander possessed of outstanding leadership and a genuine gift for war—and that was precisely why he had entrusted the ambush force to him.
That said, Xu Rong was a surrendered general of barely any standing, so one of Han Yeong's own officers was to be attached to him—and that officer was Yan Xing.
Han Yeong had originally meant to assign Pang De, but Xu Rong, still sore over the arrow she had planted in him, had balked and refused her company outright—and so Yan Xing had come along in her stead.
The White Wave horde, heads full of the plunder to come, marched on with scarcely a thought spared for caution.
"...Not yet."
Xu Rong meant to let the bandits' vanguard pass, then fall upon their center.
"Now!! Loose the signal arrow!!"
At Xu Rong's word, an archer sent a whistling arrow shrieking skyward, and before its cry had faded, a torrential rain of arrows came pouring out of the forest and down upon the White Wave horde.
"Wh-what in the—!! Gyaaaaaagh—!!"
"It's an ambush!!"
The White Wave Bandits, marching under Ding Yuan's sanctioned license to ravage nothing more dangerous than helpless civilians, recoiled as though the sky itself had fallen on them.
Thwack-thwack-thwack!!
"Gyaaaaagh!!"
The soldiers marching in the center column went down where they stood, bristling like hedgehogs beneath the deluge of arrows.
Li Le, watching his men die all around him, scrambled frantically to rally what was left.
"S-steady, men!! Show these bastards the terror of the White Wave—!!"
"And who might you be, the chief?"
Shunk!!
Yan Xing, catching sight of Li Le attempting to give orders, spurred his horse in fast and ran the man through the throat.
"Ghhk—!!"
Li Le, his neck skewered on Yan Xing's spear, tumbled from his saddle and was dead before he touched the ground.
Renowned as their bandit name was, they were no regular army at the end of the day, and they could not withstand the battle-tempered soldiers of Liang Province.
"Sweep them down, every last one!!"
Yan Xing led the cavalry in a rolling charge through the White Wave ranks, leaderless and reeling now that the man who should have commanded them lay dead.
With their leadership annihilated, the rabble of bandits—little better than an unruly mob—was wiped out in the space of a breath, and Han Yeong's army turned at its leisure for Chang'an.
One week later.
...What? It's perfectly fine?
Hearing that her homeland of Hedong Commandery had been attacked by the vicious White Wave Bandits, the woman—who had been bound for Luoyang to make her name in officialdom—had rushed home in a panic.
She made straight for the government office in Hedong.
"What is the meaning of this? Was there some other army that crushed the White Wave Bandits?"
"There was. The army returning to Yongzhou somehow knew the bandits meant to fall upon them—they laid an ambush, wiped them out to a man, and moved on without so much as accepting a reward. Helping strangers for nothing, in an age like this... Remarkable, wouldn't you say?"
"...Yongzhou?"
The orange-haired warrior with a massive axe slung across her back tilted her head, pressing for the full story.