Suppressing the Rebel Army (4)
Beigong Boyu and his rebel host sank into deep confusion at the great army that had materialized out of nowhere.
Beneath the blazing sun, the approaching force kicked up such vast billows of dust that even a glance put its strength at well over twenty thousand.
"H-How can there be an army that size...?"
Han Sui's forces were, at best, the equal of any single warlord in the coalition. There was no way the man could field the fifty thousand that the coalition's armies had only barely scraped together between them all—and the thought alone threatened to paralyze what remained of Beigong Boyu's mind. One impossible development after another, and the judgment that needed to stay cold as ice was crumbling away.
"Lord Boyu!!"
Just as his head, already swamped with complications, seemed about to burst, another messenger came dashing up at his side, face tight with alarm.
"The enemy's rear ranks are advancing!! Their entire army is charging!!"
The sight of the force that had left the vanguard to Ma Chao and silently held the rear now flooding forward all at once threw the rebels into panic all over again.
...Could it be they were waiting for reinforcements all along?!
Ma Chao's vanguard was already straining them to their limit; pile fresh troops on top of that, and the fiercely contested front line would be breached in a matter of moments. And now a separate enemy column was even closing in from the right, tightening the noose around Beigong Boyu's neck.
This was the hour when any commander worth the name was meant to square his shoulders against death and keep directing the battle. But the very first thing to surface in his cluttered mind was—
His instinct to survive.
"All troops but my guard!! Join the vanguard and hold the enemy—!!"
If the line broke against Ma Chao, he was as good as dead, and so he massed every man he could at the front.
"Sir? Then what of Ma Teng's column...?"
"I'll handle that myself!! Move, now!!"
"Yes, sir!!"
Having strong-armed his subordinates past their doubts through sheer authority, Beigong Boyu sidled over to Li Wenhou, who had sunk into precisely the same confusion he himself was in. Then, wearing a servile look, he whispered.
"General... let us flee."
"Hm? What are you saying?"
"So long as we live, we can plot for the days to come."
Beigong Boyu could see no reason to stake his life on this battle. The enemy had a detached column of some thirty thousand, and there was no telling what further reinforcements might swell their ranks afterward. Rather than fight to the last breath here, he judged it far wiser to fall back on Wuwei Commandery, shelter behind its walls, rebuild their strength, and rise again.
"Then... what of the men?"
"Naturally they will have to buy us time while we get away!!"
The bodyguards within earshot went gray at this talk of abandoning their own, but Beigong Boyu and Li Wenhou already had eyes for nothing but the road out.
"All forces, fall back and re-form the ranks!!"
As the soldiers who had joined the line drew off at his command, the "reformation" became a retreat in all but name. The guards watched their two commanders wheel their horses ahead of everyone and bolt—abandoning even the camp itself—and their faith in their leaders curdled into disgust.
"...The enemy is falling back!!"
"Good. Right on plan."
Han Yeong and Yan Xing, together with the trailing contingent under Cheng Gongying, had not joined the front line; they observed the battle as it unfolded and gave their orders from the rear.
"I'm relieved the plan took. I was worried sick we'd be seen through."
"That's the sun for you—too fierce for the naked eye to pick anything out. The dust clouds alone are enough to pass for a great host."
"...Hah. Thank goodness we weren't caught, then."
"Even if we had been, I'd have bet on Father and Uncle riding clear—their horsemanship is more than equal to it."
That was right.
The great army thundering ahead over there, spewing up mountains of dust, was a sham. The detachment under his father and his uncle numbered barely three thousand—and the bulk of those were nothing but riderless warhorses. Stones had been loaded onto the horses' backs to weigh them down enough to shake the earth, and branches lashed to their tails to churn up vast clouds of dirt, all so the column would pass for a charging host.
Pang De's original proposal had been to load stones aboard the horses for weight, then use the long shadows thrown by the fierce sunlight and the resulting din to trick the enemy into overcounting their numbers. Taken on its own, though, it was a reckless, high-risk gambit with every chance of failure.
So I had reached back to the Romance of the Three Kingdoms—how Zhang Fei once deceived Cao Cao's army by tying branches to the horses' tails to raise dust—and adapted the idea here. It was the celebrated scene of the Battle of Changban Bridge, where that bold warrior's cunning fooled Cao Cao, whose brilliance was famous throughout the realm.
Of course, the trick had only worked there because Zhang Fei's nerve and fearsome strength bore down on the enemy and raised the odds of success. And while we had no Zhang Fei of our own—we had Ma Chao.
The enemy, terror-struck by the superb martial skill of a Ma Chao who looked young enough to be a greenhorn, had hastily scraped together troops and barely managed to halt her charge—only to be thrown into fresh bewilderment at the sight of the column sweeping in from their right. And the moment they lost their heads over the disguised great host, the central army's soldiers and Cheng Gongying, who until then had done nothing but watch from behind, charged as one to throw their weight behind Ma Chao's vanguard.
A great host had materialized at their flank out of nowhere, their line was cracking—and now the enemy was hurling everything it had into the breakthrough.
Everything I had heard of Beigong Boyu's temperament said the man scorned the weak and common folk, was base and treacherous besides, and treasured his own skin above all else. Would a man like that choose to stand and fight amid this chaos—with a great host bearing down on his right, and Ma Chao, a spear honed razor-sharp, driving straight for him?
And if he lost, it was all over—warlord, rebellion, everything—with a wretched death waiting at the end of it...
Exactly as predicted, the man ordered his subordinates to hold Ma Chao's furious assault, wheeled his horse, and fled—ugly as sin.
The decoy detachment came through, then...
Our army had set two separate detachments in motion under cover of the previous night. Ma Chao's martial skill had drained the enemy's will to fight, and the decoy team under Ma Teng and Han Sui had succeeded in splitting their force apart. Now the other detachment was driving home the final wedge.
Before long, the rebels holding out against Ma Chao realized their commanders had fled, threw down their weapons, and surrendered.
An army of some five hundred lay in ambush along the road into Wuwei Commandery.
A woman with long, straight black hair sat with her eyes closed, deep in thought.
Her hometown—the one she had meant to raise back up from within, as an official of the Han—had been trampled underfoot by the rebels under Beigong Boyu. Her mother had been butchered at rebel hands, and her fellow villagers violated and plundered by them as well.
When the foreign tribes began to swarm—the Qiang and the Di among them—the court, rotten through with eunuchs, spared not a thought for her homeland out on that dangerous frontier. They were too busy lining their own pockets. And once the Yellow Turbans rose up in flood with Zhang Jiao at their head, the court severed its interest in Liang Province altogether.
The rebels she could never forgive—but the nation that had done nothing for them was every bit as bitterly resented.
She could have thrown herself on the care of an older cousin serving in Yizhou. But she could not bring herself to turn her back, in turn, on the people of a hometown the country itself had already forsaken.
And so Pang De had resigned her post, gathered the survivors of her hometown, and organized a volunteer militia to stand against the rebels. But on their strength alone they could never annihilate the rebels' vast host, and so she had waited, aching, for a hero who might deliver Liang Province...
Now, at last, that waiting had borne fruit.
"Lady Pang De!! They're coming!!"
Pang De, who had shut her eyes to steady herself and rein in feelings that kept swelling past containment, slowly opened them. A soft light, cold as lake ice, flowed through her frost-blue irises.
Over the thunder of hooves, she could make out Beigong Boyu and Li Wenhou in the distance, fleeing toward Wuwei Commandery. Just as expected—cowards who had lost the field and were running out on their own men.
Her nemesis, before her very eyes. She ground her teeth once, hard, then rose atop her white horse, lifted her crescent blade, and called out.
"Not one mistake, any of you. We must repay Lord Han Yeong for taking us in when our very standing was in doubt."
Too disciplined to risk a shout and give away the ambush, the soldiers answered by thrusting their spears skyward—a silent war cry.
The instant the enemy drew near, Pang De loosed a roar of raw, burning passion that stood in stark contrast to her usual composure.
"CHARGE!!"
UWAAAAAAAH—!!
The rebels, just arrived at Wuwei and letting their guard down at last, were staggered by a battle cry that erupted out of nowhere—and by the column that burst into view with it, galloping straight down on them.
"An ambush was planted here?!"
But slowly, the alarm on their faces gave way to a lighter shade. The enemy soldiers numbered about the same as their own force, and their tension quietly drained away; their equipment, moreover, had the look of a volunteer militia's—shabby beyond description.
Unlike against Ma Chao, Beigong Boyu now drew his sword brimming with confidence. He was, after all, the head of the rebellion and a warlord of Liang Province—a man who had long made his living by the blade. Certain he could not lose to some nameless lowborn soldier, he urged his horse into a charge.
A black-haired enemy commander came rushing to meet him. She was no Ma Chao, but a great beauty all the same, and for an instant Beigong Boyu eyed that face and smacked his lips—what a waste, he thought, to cut her down.
"Surrender, and I'll spare your li—!!"
Shkk—!!
Pang De's crescent blade carved a single silver line through the air, and Beigong Boyu's head soared high into the sky.
Beigong Boyu.
He had been an inadequate commander in this war, and misfortune had stacked itself upon misfortune—but his single greatest piece of bad luck in this battle was, beyond any doubt, one thing alone: that he never knew the only warrior in all of present-day Liang Province who could stand shoulder to shoulder with Ma Chao was the woman right in front of him. Pang De.
The instant their leader's head went flying, the rebels—Li Wenhou included—froze where they stood. Instinct alone told them everything: Pang De's martial skill was anything but ordinary.
"Kill them all."
With that glacial pronouncement—uttered in the same breath as she cut down her nemesis—the militia fell upon the rebel remnants as one and began the slaughter.
It was the moment the rebellion raised by the warlords of Liang Province met its end.