Annihilating Dong Zhuo (2)
Liu Xie, newly invested as Prince of Fufeng, must have been plagued by headaches with all the work stacked upon her desk.
After all, Liang Province was a land that, until only a few years ago, had lain wholly beyond the court's reach — a lawless frontier where warlords who had raised their banners against the Han imperial family ran wild. Even Yong Province, ruled by Dong Zhuo, nominally a warlord of the Han itself, was a complete shambles thanks to the tyranny he heaped upon its people. There was hardly any need to explain further.
As on any other day, Liu Xie was attending to her duties as a prince with Diaochan, her head maid, at her side. But when she heard from me of Dong Zhuo's past in Liang Province — how he had wrung wealth from the people and drenched the land in slaughter — she flew into a fury, brandishing her small fists in the air.
"What!? What an utterly outrageous scoundrel!! Han Yeong, I charge you to march forth and deliver judgment upon that evildoer!!"
"Yes. I shall obey your command, Your Highness."
Without pausing to weigh any matter of state, Liu Xie — incensed that Dong Zhuo had clasped hands with the foreign tribes and was committing outrages no different from Ding Yuan's — commanded me to take the field. To her, I'm sure it looked like a display of righteous wrath; she was still young, though, and to my eyes she looked nothing so much as adorable.
'And knowing that she was meant to be Dong Zhuo's puppet from the very start, it does stir something in me.'
In the original history, suffering at Dong Zhuo's hands was where Liu Xie's misfortune began. As a longtime Three Kingdoms enthusiast, the thought filled me with feelings I couldn't quite name.
'Because I can feel it, plainly — history is changing, because of the road I've walked.'
My audience concluded, I bowed my head in courteous farewell and left the palace.
"My lord!!"
'Yan Xing?'
I had just received permission to march from Liu Xie and was on my way out of the government offices when Yan Xing came galloping up on horseback to meet me.
"What is it? Is everything ready for the campaign?"
"It is, my lord — but a small matter has come up."
"A matter?"
Yan Xing nodded at my question and answered.
"A general is waiting before the city gate, asking to be taken into your service. She says she wishes to repay your deliverance of Hedong Commandery the other day by becoming one of your officers."
'...Hedong Commandery?'
During Ding Yuan's assault, I had posted Yan Xing and Xu Rong in ambush, with orders that if no pursuit followed, they were to sweep the bandits from the roads on their way back. And since it was thanks to the devotion of Hedong's governor that my meeting with Liu Xie had gone off without a hitch, that order had been repayment in kind.
'So the goodwill I extended has come back around...'
"What would you have me do? Will you meet her?"
"......."
Two names sprang to mind at once as the most famous generals to come out of Hedong — but one of them had already sworn the Oath of the Peach Garden and become another man's sworn sibling, which meant there was a fair chance this was the other.
'No way...'
"...This general of yours. Did you notice anything distinctive about her? Her weapon, perhaps?"
"Huh? How did you know? She was carrying an enormous axe across her back."
An enormous axe.
At those words, my heart leapt all over again.
'Bingo.'
I fought down the urge to let my face split into a grin and did my best to keep my composure. When Pang De and Fa Zheng had joined me, I had been far too transparent in my delight, and I'd drawn more than a few strange looks for it.
"...All right, then. Let's go have a look."
"Yes, my lord."
I already knew in my bones who that general was, and I spurred my horse alongside Yan Xing toward the place where she waited.
Perhaps it was the menacing weapon she carried, but the soldiers had ringed her about with wary watch; she held both hands raised to show she bore no ill will. The woman with the short-cropped, tawny-yellow hair and the axe slung across her back caught sight of me arriving with Yan Xing, set her weapon down, and offered a respectful cupped-fist salute.
"...Would you be Lord Han Yeong, the General Who Pacifies the West?"
"I would. And you would be?"
"I am called Xu Huang, courtesy name Gongming, a native of Yang County in Hedong Commandery."
Just as I had expected.
'...This is incredible.'
They say good deeds bring good fortune — a saying I had stopped believing the day I became an adult, but one I felt I could believe in again, right here and now.
In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, her military merits had been whittled down, leaving her somewhat underrated among the ranks of illustrious fierce generals; in the official histories, however, she stood, beyond all dispute, among the S-rank warriors. One of the Five Elite Generals of Wei, renowned throughout the kingdom — and in the histories, one of the very few whom even the arrogant Guan Yu acknowledged, alongside Zhang Liao. As a commander who led whole armies, she was an undefeated general, a leader one could truly call peerless.
Xu Huang. Gongming.
And she had come to me of her own two feet.
Jia Xu, who had set out even faster than Han Yeong, arrived with Huche'er at a county town near Anding Commandery.
Discreetly, she used an agent to send word ahead, and the general who received her letter slipped out of camp under the pretext of replenishing supplies and came to find her.
"What is the meaning of this?!"
The general who had come to Jia Xu glared at her with eyes brimming with wariness.
They had once eaten from the same pot in Dong Zhuo's army, yet this woman had cast aside her loyalty to her lord and attached herself to Han Yeong — a traitor, plain and simple. Naturally, the general's expression could only harden.
Jia Xu, by contrast, remained perfectly serene from beginning to end, gently placating the general with her usual enigmatic gaze.
"Do lower your voice, General. You're frightening people — aren't you?"
"Hold your tongue!! You serve in Han Yeong's army — how do you expect me to lower my voice?!!"
To the general, Han Yeong was the sworn enemy who had brought about his uncle's death. It would have been stranger had he not spat fury at a woman serving in that man's ranks.
Yet even beneath the general's threats, Jia Xu only returned a calm, unruffled smile.
"If you truly meant to kill me, General, you would have had no need to raise your voice. You would simply have had your men seize me where I stand."
"......"
He knew it was true.
Had Jia Xu not been an old friend who had once helped him in the past, the general would have seized her on the spot and handed her over to Dong Zhuo. But she knew his character — one of the few men in Dong Zhuo's army who still understood honor — and had come in the firm certainty that he would not betray her.
Though, admittedly, even that honor was a lukewarm thing. Weighing loyalty in one hand and one's own safety in the other — the portrait of a perfectly ordinary man in these chaotic times.
Of course, had the general actually tried to hand her over against her expectations, Huche'er — standing rock-steady at Jia Xu's side — would scarcely have remained idle. As it was, with that colossal giant guarding her, even a general reasonably confident in his own martial skill found himself breaking into a cold sweat, his bluster deflating of its own accord.
With Hua Xiong, their foremost champion, dead, no warrior left in Dong Zhuo's present army could stand against Huche'er.
"...Why write such a letter and lure me out here?"
The letter had promised to show him a way out, and had bidden him come to Jia Xu herself. When the general demanded her reason, she answered readily, laying out her purpose without pretense.
"Just what the letter said. As one who hails from the same homeland as you, General, I have come to open a path of survival for you."
"'A path'? What in blazes is that supposed to mean?"
The general, whose circumstances were hardly desperate, wore a baffled expression — why would anyone speak of opening a road to survival for a man in no danger at all?
"My lord has raised his army to destroy Dong Zhuo, root and branch. Over the affair in Luoyang he is furious beyond measure; no matter that Dong Zhuo holds the Red Hare, this time there will be nowhere left for him to flee."
"...And? You cannot possibly be telling me to defect to Han Yeong's army."
Jia Xu answered without a flicker of hesitation.
"How perceptive of you. That is exactly what I am telling you."
To be told to serve beneath the man responsible for his uncle's death — of course the general erupted.
"Ridiculous!! How could I ever enter the service of the enemy who sent my uncle to his grave?! What do you take me for?!"
His uncle Zhang Ji's death at Didao — the battle that had, in effect, doomed Dong Zhuo's faction — had shaken the general to his core. In the first place, the only reason he had entered Dong Zhuo's service at all was that his uncle had been there.
"Then what — will you simply sit and wait for destruction? No one knows better than you do, General, that this war offers no chance of victory."
However much Dong Zhuo allied himself with the northern tribes and the rebellious warlords, it had only narrowed the gap in numbers. The quality of his fierce generals, and the discipline of soldiers drilled to the bone, were beyond all comparison. And in strategy — even were she herself to stay her hand, Fa Zheng alone would leave Dong Zhuo unable to respond, crushed utterly.
Ding Yuan held Bing Province and Sili with the Emperor under his thumb, while Han Yeong governed Yong and Liang Provinces and bore the rightful mandate of Liu Xie, Prince of Fufeng. Against Han Yeong — one of the most powerful forces under heaven — she expounded her logic: there was no path to victory.
"That may be......"
Confronted with the cold reality Jia Xu had laid bare, the general's voice trailed off. Even by his own reckoning, this war was hopeless.
"As I understand it, Zhang Ji was your uncle, yes — but he never showed you a kindness deep enough to stake your life upon. So tell me, what reason remains for you to avenge him?"
"......"
In days past, the general had cut down a man named Qu Sheng and built a name so fine that the people of his village hailed him as a hero — a man of righteousness, they called him. What he feared now was staining that honor-bound reputation.
"Because you have spent your strength holding back the tribes rather than wholeheartedly abetting Dong Zhuo's tyranny, you still have a chance. But do you truly believe you can remain a hero to the very end, serving a man who savages his own people?"
It was a warning: the very reputation the general sought to protect would curdle into infamy so long as he stood with Dong Zhuo. Under her methodical persuasion, his heart began, little by little, to move.
"...But would I not become a base and wretched man — abandoning my lord for my own safety, crawling beneath my enemy?"
"Have you not remained under Dong Zhuo all this time to protect your aunt? Then let this be no different: say you surrendered to guarantee your aunt's life."
Jia Xu pressed him to defect, holding out Lady Zou — Zhang Ji's widow — as his justification.
"My lord intends to put every last soul of the Dong clan to the sword, sparing only the young children. The officers under Dong Zhuo's command, naturally, will fare no better."
Those words sank into the general's vitals like a keen dagger.
'...He has a point. Fighting on like this means nothing but a dog's death.'
Even marching to war with the valiant Hua Xiong, the Four Robbers, and the cunning Li Ru at his side, Dong Zhuo had been routed utterly. The tribes he despised, and the warlords who had come over to him — an army forged from such an alliance, lacking any true cohesion. How could such a force ever hope to win?
The man whose stubbornness had seemed born of devotion to his uncle yielded, before he knew it, to Jia Xu's honeyed tongue, and his loyalty to Dong Zhuo began to sway like a reed in the wind.
"...Will he truly accept me?"
"My lord cherishes not only brilliant talent, but steadfast talent as well. Lay down your grudge, and you will be treated far better than you ever were under Dong Zhuo. You need only look at me for proof."
Jia Xu was more than satisfied with the treatment she received from Han Yeong. He lent a ready ear to the counsel of a defector like herself, and he trusted her.
The general turned her words over in his mind for a long moment before he finally spoke.
"...What must I do?"
'He's crossed over.'
At those words, Jia Xu allowed herself a smile of quiet triumph. Having won the general over, she walked him through his tasks step by careful step; after long agonizing, he nodded his assent and turned back toward Anding.