Consolidation (1)
As I drew closer, a rank, fishy reek of blood washed over me, and a spectacle gruesome enough to turn the stomach spread out before my eyes.
Dong Zhuo and his men, judged at the hands of the enraged populace, had been torn apart without mercy, reduced to cold corpses and mangled hunks of butchered flesh.
So this is the wrath of the people, then.
Dong Zhuo's body, the only one that still held any recognizable shape, was lacquered a deep glistening crimson, while his face—skull smashed to pulp—had been pounded beyond all recognition.
That his frame had held together even after being savagely beaten to death by the hands of countless citizens was probably thanks to the iron bones he'd been born with as a man of war.
...I did read about this in the books, but seeing it with my own eyes, it's even more pitiable than I imagined.
With cold, detached eyes, I looked down upon the savagely shredded corpses. I felt nothing in particular, really—they were simply men who had died precisely the deaths they had coming.
There is a saying: the will of the people is the will of Heaven. Dong Zhuo was living proof of what awaits a ruler who scorns that truth and lives only to glut his own ravenous desires—he had met a truly merciless end. Witnessing so wretched a finale carved the lesson deep into my mind: one must never do anything that betrays the hearts of the people.
I gave the soldier at my side his orders: drive a wick into the belly of Dong Zhuo—the one corpse that had somehow kept its shape despite the beating—and set it alight. The soldier obeyed, planting the wick and touching flame to it.
Bitter as the winter cold was, the moment the wick caught, the fire—fed by the oil mingled with the blood soaked into the corpse—roared up into a blazing pyre.
"My lord. You must fall back."
When my guards urged me—I had been watching the raging flames from far too close—I withdrew a few paces.
"...Even dead, he's good for something."
The corpses made ample fuel; despite the frigid weather, the flames raged fiercely for a long while afterward, wrapping their warmth around Anding—the life drained out of her—and casting a dim glow over the scene.
That takes care of one nuisance.
With Dong Zhuo, the thorn that had been pricking at my rear, finally crushed, I had succeeded in bringing the whole of Yongzhou and Liangzhou securely into my grasp.
The foreign tribes still lingered, but so long as we stood firm at Wuwei and Anding while Father continued his policy of conciliation, they would pose no great threat.
Anding, for its part, I intended to entrust to Zhang Xiu. He had a record of service as an officer in Dong Zhuo's army, so the appointment carried a meaning: govern Anding, and make atonement to its people. Talent was scarce as it was, and Zhang Xiu would be kept busy enough restoring the ruined commanderies and counties and holding back the tribes pressing in from the north.
Well, he can shoulder at least that much.
It was not as though Zhang Xiu bore no guilt whatsoever—and did I imagine the people would forgive him over a single gesture? At least he had, in the original history, served as the warlord who governed Wancheng in his own right, and the tribes could be held off in concert with Uncle Ma Teng, so I foresaw no great difficulty.
Besides, if he took the field alongside our army, he'd end up looking at the face of Ma Chao—the woman who killed his uncle. That seemed a touch cruel from a nephew's standpoint...
With that in mind, I met with Zhang Xiu separately and conveyed my wishes.
"...Yes, my lord. I will carry out your orders as instructed."
Zhang Xiu raised no great complaint and went along with my judgment.
In the course of things, I also came to meet Lady Zou, the widow of the late Zhang Ji. She told me that her husband had never been a particularly good man, and showed me little resentment over it. As an aside—true to the original history, she was a beauty of quite remarkable grace, and Xu Rong and Yan Xing both flushed and had their eyes light up at the sight of her.
A faint flicker of interest stirred in my own eyes as well, but Ma Chao caught it at once and, green with jealousy, pinched me in the ribs. I had shown only a flicker, not a full blush—wasn't that going a bit too far?
To restore the commanderies of Anding that Dong Zhuo's forces had gutted, we distributed his and Zhao Cilong's wealth among the people of Anding and spent some time taking the measure of local conditions.
But what on earth am I supposed to do about this...?
Snort.
A horse dyed blood-red from head to tail, a famed steed that could run a thousand li in a day—the mount celebrated as the supercar of the Three Kingdoms—blew out a rough, chuffing snort.
Red Hare.
With Dong Zhuo dead and Red Hare in our hands, I had agonized at length over who should receive the horse. Had I won Lü Bu over at Luoyang, she would have been the obvious recipient, but that plan had long since come off the rails. Perhaps the beast was particular about people: whenever Yan Xing or Xu Rong so much as reached for the reins, it would snort and stamp, baring open hostility.
...Then again, if it won't carry Xu Rong or Yan Xing, why on earth did it carry Dong Zhuo?
In skill at arms, neither Xu Rong nor Yan Xing fell short of Dong Zhuo, yet the horse seemed to set exacting standards about whose back it would bear. Ma Chao and Pang De, the finest martial artists among us, each tried mounting it in turn, but it bucked so savagely that breaking it in looked to be a long, hard road.
"It's going to take quite a stretch of time to handle this horse, isn't it?"
At Ma Chao's words, Zhang Xiu, who had been observing the proceedings, sidled over and offered what he knew. "I'm told even Dong Zhuo spent a considerable length of time—months, in fact—breaking Red Hare in."
"...That long?"
Lü Bu and Guan Yu had never needed any such process, though...
"...Mmm. Well then, I've no need of it. I have Shalifei."
I had thought to give the horse to Ma Chao, but she refused—perhaps out of attachment to the mount she had raised since girlhood. To be fair, Shalifei might not rank alongside Red Hare, but she was at least a famed steed of the same class as Jueying, the horse Cao Cao rode.
"...And besides, Han Yeong. Couldn't you just tame it the way Dong Zhuo did, and ride it yourself?"
"Huh? Why me?"
Red Hare was a horse that only came into its own beneath a peerless hero—that was the picture it was made to complete. Was there any use for it in this world more wasteful than that?
"Because if you're the one riding it, you can run for your life any time a battle turns against you. You're weak, after all."
"......"
Ma Chao's remark was pure fact, leaving no room for rebuttal. What drove the point home like a dagger between the ribs was that Pang De, who owed me her very loyalty, nodded solemnly and echoed the sentiment.
Every so often, in spare moments, Ma Chao or Fa Zheng gave me instruction in the martial arts and in strategy, but Ma Chao apparently nursed no expectation that my skill would ever grow to the level of even a passable officer.
So the matter settled itself: Red Hare was a prize magnificent enough to woo someone over to our cause, and the consensus hardened into a plan to hold it in reserve, riding it in turns as circumstances allowed.
You never know—it might come in handy for winning someone over someday... Guan Yu, say.
Once the resettlement of those who had lost homes and belongings to Dong Zhuo's atrocities was complete, we set about pacifying Anding and the surrounding districts. A few days later, our garrison returned to Chang'an.
From there, time flowed past like a river; spring passed with the snows melting little by little, and gradually warmer days arrived in their turn.
May, 189 AD (Sixth Year of Zhongping)
Having finished off Dong Zhuo's faction, we allowed ourselves a brief season of refitting. Ma Chao and Pang De threw themselves into honing their martial skill and stratagems, while Yan Xing and Xu Rong drilled the troops in camp. And with the addition of Xu Huang—whose severity was so ingrained it might as well have been carved into her bones—the wails of soldiers ringing across the parade grounds swelled louder by the day.
Fa Zheng and Jia Xu were each buried in their own affairs, and Fa Yan was much the same.
Ding Yuan must have Luoyang fully in hand by now.
By this point he would surely have made common cause with Zhang Yan and Guo Tai—the very bandits he had invited in—and seized complete control of the Luoyang government, kneading its power in his own two fists. Luoyang's officials, lacking the strength to stop them, could do nothing but watch the outrages unfold.
If the Luoyang campaign proved one thing beyond argument, it was our shortage of talent.
At the Battle of Chitu we had still had Uncle Ma Teng and Chenggong Ying at hand, and Father himself had guarded the home front, so the absence had not been felt so keenly.
Warlord stock rarely produces officers of real ability, after all.
If only there had been more administrators to stand beside Fa Yan and shoulder the civil work, or more officers to back Ma Chao and Pang De—perhaps we might even have taken Ding Yuan alive. The regret gnawed at me. True, we had captured Xu Rong at Luoyang and raised him up as one of our generals, and Xu Huang's out-of-the-blue arrival had greatly thickened our officer corps, but the hunger for talent had not faded.
And so, in preparation for a future in which an anti–Ding Yuan coalition would surely rise, I set about steadily building up our military strength while devoting my chief efforts to gathering talent.
The trouble is that Liangzhou produces no one worth the name at this point in time.
In the Liang region, it would take the coming age of warring warlords before the capable officers came of age and took up their commissions. Ma Chao and Fa Zheng, and the Ma siblings as well, had all—strangely enough—been born some five years ahead of their original-history counterparts, which was why they had entered military life so early. Ma Dai, for her part, was still short of adulthood.
And with Liu Xie, Prince of Fufeng—she of true imperial blood—by my side, talent would flock to us in greater numbers than before: some out of the wish to serve and protect her, some hoping to catch the throne's eye and climb toward advancement.
With that thought, I first posted recruitment proclamations throughout Liangzhou and Yongzhou, the provinces within my reach.
Officers, ideally... No, honestly, I'd just be glad if plenty of people answered the call at all.
He had failed in his bid to enthrone Liu Xie, the former Prince of Chenliu, as emperor—but having taken possession of a Son of Heaven all the same, Ding Yuan wielded a power that knew no bounds, precisely as Zhang Yang had counseled. Before his might, the emperor was nothing more than a puppet.
Unlike the emperor, the Empress Dowager He had no further use to him; seizing on her brother He Jin's death as a pretext, he had her dragged out and executed—and that, too, had succeeded without a hitch.
Ding Yuan, who had melted down gold to cast armor and helmets and refitted his troops in battle dress of the finest silk, was basking in the pleasure of a lifetime. Having driven Han Yeong out of Luoyang through Zhang Yang's treacherous designs and seized the reins of government, he had mounted the seat of Grand General with his own hands and was drunk on the taste of power.
And yet, for all the power he had grasped, one great weight of worry remained to him...
Lü Bu.
In return for rescuing him in his moment of peril, she had petitioned him: end the unjust treatment of her own subordinates, and stop stripping the people bare. Ding Yuan had been obliged to honor the request—Cao Cao's betrayal and Han Yeong's grip on the west demanded vigilance—but when it came to the pillaging carried on by the soldiers of Zhang Yan and Guo Tai, he had not lifted a finger to stop it.
When Lü Bu learned that the commanderies and counties of Sili were being wrung dry by the Black Mountain Bandits and the White Wave Bandits, she had come to lodge her protest directly with him. And when Ding Yuan held stubbornly to his line—nothing to be done, they were not under his command—she had apparently led out her own personal troops and meted out punishment herself, cutting down with her own blade the chiefs of the bandit crews who lived by plunder. In the end, Zhang Yan and Guo Tai had been forced by her strength to put a stop to the looting.
That witless fool of a woman...!!
Ding Yuan could not fathom why Lü Bu insisted on playing at being clean-handed. She spoke of holding a warrior's honor—but if that were truly so, then at Mengjin Port she ought to have halted the Bingzhou army's atrocities by raising the banner of open revolt, not by mere objection.
In the eyes of Luoyang's people, she must look like nothing so much as a hypocrite quivering with false virtue... A hopelessly dim creature.
Not that he was one to talk. Lü Bu knew only how to fight; her political insight lagged appallingly, and her field of vision was narrow as a slit. Perhaps out of a warrior's honor, or perhaps because in this Confucian Han dynasty she could not bring herself to choose the path of killing the adoptive father who raised her, she refused to commit to any decisive course—only repeating one irresolute act after another.
...And that is exactly why she is a piece to be discarded.
For the present, with enemies circling Ding Yuan himself, he was treating her well again as he had in Bingzhou, and Lü Bu, for her part, could not easily move against him while shackled by the chain of adoption. But the moment she learned of what he had done in Bingzhou...
the Sky-Piercing Halberd would come for him without a flicker of hesitation.
Naturally, Ding Yuan had judged that the hour to throw away this hunting dog had not yet come: long ago he had destroyed every official document that could substantiate the affair, and he bound his close attendants in strict silence—but the dread never left him. Even now he was selecting the boldest soldiers to serve as his personal guard. And were he to discard Lü Bu now, there would be no one left to hold back Han Yeong in Chang'an; that, too, gnawed at his skull.
"Somehow I must find someone who can stand in Lü Bu's place..."
A guard who had been secretly eavesdropping on Ding Yuan's anxious mutterings slipped out of the palace and made his way to a certain scholar.
"...I see. So you're telling me Ding Yuan has grown uneasy over how to handle Lü Bu."
The brown-haired woman—one who worried for the Son of Heaven and had long been biding her time to assassinate Ding Yuan—closed the book she had been reading and murmured as she listened to the soldier's report. She pressed a modest sum into his palm as a reward, then rose to go meet with someone.