Annihilating Dong Zhuo (1)
Once the winter that had seeped its chill into the very marrow of our bones finally passed and the snow began its slow melt, I convened a council and summoned my military officers and civil officials alike. Ma Chao, too, had shaken off her gloom and recovered her spirits — which meant the time had come to deal with Dong Zhuo without delay and eliminate the menace he posed for good.
When the officials, each pulled away from their duties, gathered in one hall for the council, Fa Zheng — who had spent the past months in Chang'an collecting intelligence on the resurgent Dong Zhuo — rose to her feet. She began outlining the key figures of the forces that had newly rallied to him, now that Dong Zhuo had made his comeback in Anding.
"We don't know through what channels he reached them, but he has enticed the warlords who nursed grievances against us — Zhao Qinglong foremost among them — and absorbed their armies into his own."
A warlord of Guanxi, Zhao Qinglong had joined our army, accomplished nothing of note, and spent the entire war against Dong Zhuo at Didao doing his best impression of a detached spectator.
I had crossed paths with him once before, when his assets were seized on the charge of refusing to fight Dong Zhuo; even then, he had done nothing but fawn and bow in his eagerness to please me, never once showing a flicker of defiance.
...So I had been keeping an eye on him, intending to find a use for the man if he proved capable — and instead he swallowed Dong Zhuo's bait and turned his coat.
Having treaded that tightrope only to have his property confiscated as punishment, he might well bear a grudge, I supposed. What mystified me was his decision to throw in his lot with an army that was all but dead and buried.
Yan Baihu I had at least heard of — a man of real consequence as Sun Ce's adversary during the conquest of Jiangdong — so it was little wonder that even those who fancied themselves experts on the Three Kingdoms had never heard of Zhao Qinglong. Unlike Yan Baihu, who in the Romance bore the grandiose title of King of Virtue of Eastern Wu and exerted enormous influence over the Jiangdong warlords through the Shanyue tribes, Zhao Qinglong had nothing to his name but the name itself. At best, he would have gone down in history as one of the expendables who marched off and died in the Guanzhong generals' rebellion Ma Chao once sparked.
Then again — a White Tiger and an Azure Dragon, but no Vermilion Bird or Black Tortoise...?
While I was briefly lost in that flight of nonsense, Fa Zheng's briefing carried on in her calm, level voice.
"Furthermore, he has joined hands with the Qiang tribes and somehow managed to rebuild his strength, modest as it may be, as a warlord."
Dong Zhuo's faction, fleeced to the bone by us and beaten down in defeat after defeat, lingered on as hardly more than a husk. Of the officers still under his command, the only one with any real renown was Zhang Xiu — the rest were little more than dead weight like Niu Fu and Dong Huang.
"...Tch. That bastard's harder to kill than a damn roach. Scrounging up an army somehow, just to keep getting under our skin."
Ma Chao muttered under her breath, her face crumpled with irritation at Dong Zhuo and his talent for being a nuisance, and I bobbed my head along in agreement.
But then, what sort of man was he? The moment the coalition gained ground on him, he had relocated his capital to Chang'an, close to his own power base — and because surrendering Luoyang offended his greed, he ransacked the imperial tombs, put the city to the torch, and blasted apart the very city where the glory of the Later Han had first dawned.
That was also why, once the Battle of Didao ended, I had given my men only a few days' rest before driving hard into Yongzhou instead of taking my leisure.
Because who knew what fresh lunacy he'd commit if he were left to his own devices.
Had our departure come any later, he might well have burned Chang'an rather than hand it over, then bolted for Anding.
Had the Ten Attendants' Incident not erupted far earlier than scheduled, Dong Zhuo would not still be drawing breath. Our army would have marched on Anding and shut his windpipe for good before he ever had the chance to rise again.
And Dong Zhuo, precisely as I had anticipated, went and pulled off a stunt of staggering lunacy.
Clasping hands with the chieftains of the foreign tribes...
That the people of Han loathe the northern tribes to the marrow is a fact known to every soul under heaven. Every year they come flooding down from the north, butchering the men of the villages and dragging off the women and children — show me one person who could look kindly on that.
The famed scholars and gentry of Sili went a step further still, despising and ostracizing anyone born along the northern frontier — from Xiliang, Bingzhou, or Youzhou — on the presumption that people who bled fighting savage tribes must be coarse and graceless. Prejudice, pure and simple.
Dong Zhuo was a son of Liangzhou himself, and knew that better than anyone — yet he reached for the tribes' hands all the same, as if to say this was his revenge upon me.
It would have been funny if it weren't so absurd — the man pinned false crimes on us first, tried to strike before we could, got hammered into the dirt for it, and now this was his idea of venting his rage.
"Either way, the sooner we march, the better. If he decides to hole up and fortify, he'll plunder the counties around Anding and slaughter their people while he's at it."
Knowing Dong Zhuo regarded the common folk as worth less than the weeds by the roadside, the danger was more than real. At my words, Fa Zheng nodded her assent.
"Yes, my lord. You are entirely right. Dragging this out any longer would bring us nothing good."
Truthfully, if not for the driving snow and the fatigue our soldiers had banked up on the round trip to Luoyang, we would have stormed in and smashed Dong Zhuo's army long before now.
From the enemy's standpoint, theirs was a coalition of sorts — a pack fused around Dong Zhuo for the single purpose of toppling us, their common foe. But as every coalition in history demonstrates, so long as each member wants something different, cracks are inevitable. Sweep this lot aside, and not a soul in Liangzhou or Yongzhou would remain to raise a hand against us. Our strength was overwhelming to begin with, and an enemy thrown together as an alliance — poor at coordinating, shorter on trust than on soldiers — could hardly manage any unity of strategy. In a word, they were no different from the shambolic mess of Ding Yuan's army we had fought before.
"If I may — might I offer a little suggestion of my own?"
It was then that Jia Xu, who had been listening quietly to Fa Zheng's briefing, raised her hand and spoke.
"Of course. Speak your mind."
"I will win one of Dong Zhuo's commanders over to our side and shake their alliance apart from within."
Jia Xu had come out of Dong Zhuo's own camp, so there were bound to be a few commanders she knew by face.
Then again, nearly every name that mattered was already dead by now. Who was even left for her to sway? If anyone, it was Zhang Xiu, and Zhang Xiu alone. But...
Curious whether my guess was right, I put the question to her.
"Who are you planning to bring over?"
"A general by the name of Zhang Xiu — of Wuwei Commandery in Liangzhou, my own birthplace."
Just as I expected.
"But will Zhang Xiu truly come over to our side? We're the ones who killed his uncle."
Zhang Ji — Zhang Xiu's uncle, and a member of the Four Robbers — had, by the reports, been cut down by Ma Chao at the Battle of Didao. By any ordinary measure, a man would carry nothing but vengeance for the enemy who spilled his uncle's blood. He would hardly bury the grudge and defect — unless he possessed magnanimity like Cao Cao's, the kind that could inter a blood feud and raise the very slayer of kin as prized talent.
"Worry not, my lord. I know Zhang Xiu's character well — he is a son of the same hometown as I."
Jia Xu professed her certainty with evident pride, assured in her read of her fellow townsman's nature.
...Well. Might as well leave it in her hands. She shared his home region — and in the history I remembered, she had even served under Zhang Xiu himself. Naturally she understood his temperament far better than I, who knew the man only from the pages of a book. If her scheme succeeded and our losses shrank, so much the better. Besides, as a fellow native of the region, she was bound to know him better than I ever could from print.
"Good. If that's your resolve, then go and try."
At my words, Jia Xu bowed her head in gratitude.
"Thank you, my lord. This time, I will not disappoint you."
...I was never disappointed to begin with.
Her schemes had landed true, annihilating Ding Yuan's host and driving the man to the very brink of death — the only reason it failed was Lü Bu's intervention. And yet she insists on calling it a failed stratagem, her own blunder, for failing to account for even Lü Bu's temperament.
When the council ended, Jia Xu set out for Anding Commandery ahead of us, Huche'er looming at her side as escort.
Time we made our own preparations, then.
Some time before, I had instructed the Ma siblings to carry a letter to my uncle Ma Teng in Wuwei, and then gathered an army to strike Dong Zhuo down. Wuwei stood closer to Anding than we did, so it would even be possible for him to arrive first and throw a cordon around the city before us.
With that arranged, I made my way to Liu Xie, Prince of Fufeng, to seek her sanction for the campaign against Dong Zhuo. Going through the motions of these reports was a troublesome formality, I admit — but every step of it was a deliberate process for winning her trust. Put on the appearance of a loyal servant of the throne, and the court attendants from the central government who trailed after Liu Xie would learn to trust me as well.
Honor her as befits a prince of the realm, then destroy Dong Zhuo — the butcher who preys upon his own people — and credibility would follow. A sound method.
With that thought, I set out to meet her.
By the time Han Yeong's army had all but finished marching out...
"...So this is Chang'an?"
A woman with a massive axe strapped across her back arrived at the city, leading a body of troops with her elderly mother among them. Prosperous as befitted a place that had once been the capital of Han, it drew gasps of wonder from a woman who had lived her whole life in poverty.
When Ding Yuan's grip on power sent the Black Mountain Bandits and the White Wave Bandits rampaging across Sili, she had abandoned all ambition of making her name in Luoyang.
The Governor of Hedong told me that the army of General Han Yeong, who rules this land, drove back the bandits that had come pouring into our homeland.
More than that, he stood as protector to Liu Xie, Prince of Fufeng, of the late Emperor's own blood. Set against Ding Yuan, who clutched the Son of Heaven in his grasp, neither his cause, nor his backing, nor his strength fell far short. Through the falling snow she had sifted every rumor about him, and time and again the same verdict surfaced: his character was good.
"I do wonder, then — what manner of man will he be, face to face?"
The axe-bearing woman general, who had commanded her men the whole while while shielding her aged mother from the bandits' reach, set her steps toward Chang'an.