Regrouping (3)
Alone in the training yard, Lu Bu silently tended to her Sky-Piercing Halberd, replaying in her mind the words that had been hurled at her during the bandit suppression.
"You filthy hypocrite!!"
"Pretending to be noble all on your own when you're the same rotten breed as the rest of us — you hypocritical bitch!!"
"Like it or not, you're all just as filthy as they come, aren't you?"
She had saved the people from the bandits' plunder, and the only thanks she received was contempt — sneering looks and spiteful gossip instead of awe or reverence.
CLANG!!
The halberd crashed to the ground, and Lu Bu pressed a hand against her throbbing forehead.
'...How did it ever come to this.'
Lu Bu — first among all who had raised Ding Yuan, Governor of Bingzhou, into Luoyang's most powerful man — seized her head in her hands and pulled at her own hair.
Here stood the woman who had helped Ding Yuan drag the Black Mountain Bandits and the White Wave Bandits into Sili until the province seethed with outlaws, now posing as the general who drove those very bandits out to protect Sili's people.
To any observer, her record was a walking contradiction, and most of the celebrated scholars and great magnates of Sili Province made a point of saying so, tearing her down for her hypocrisy.
And so Lu Bu went digging through her memories, searching for the moment she had become a general who lived by such contradictory deeds.
Wuyuan Commandery, Bingzhou — her childhood years.
As a girl, she had never been the type to read the room or spare a thought for anyone's feelings. Quite the opposite: in the barren frontier of Bingzhou, raided again and again by the foreign tribes, she had believed from her early teens that the strong taking from the weak was simply the way of the world.
So she ran with delinquents and ruffians, extorting money and goods from anyone weaker than herself, time and time again. If it profited her, she betrayed even friends without a second thought.
Under all the world, I alone am supreme.
Such was the creed of the teenage Lu Bu — a girl whose prospects were rotten to the root. Barely past her coming-of-age ceremony, drunk on her own inborn strength, she was arrogance incarnate.
Her mother, who had raised her alone after the tribesmen took her father while she was still too young to understand, scolded her for it time and again. But Lu Bu held that the law of tooth and claw was the one true law under heaven.
Were the tribesmen not, even now, sweeping across the border to strip the powerless of everything they owned?
Reared in a land where bandits ran wild and foreign riders crossed the frontier at will, she felt no guilt whatsoever about taking what belonged to others.
And so she paid little heed to the words her mother — the only person she had ever loved and cherished — pounded into her ears until they must have hung heavy. But the tragedy that struck days later became the spark that changed Lu Bu's heart.
She had been away on an errand to a distant place when the tribes came down to raid.
Lu Bu sprinted home in a panic — and found her mother collapsed, a foreign blade buried in her belly.
She tried desperately to carry her to a physician, but the wound was already mortal. There was only time for a final will before her mother breathed her last.
"...Live a life devoted to others..."
Her mother had spoken those words out of a genuine, gnawing fear for her daughter — a daughter blessed with strength counted among the finest under heaven, yet who used it for nothing grander than gratifying her own desires.
Blind with vengeance, Lu Bu took up sword and spear and cut down the tribesmen who had invaded her homeland — literally to the last man.
And it was Ding Yuan, arriving too late to relieve her hometown of Jiuyuan County, who witnessed that scene.
Her unforgettable feat — a one-woman massacre of the raiders — marked her out at once, and so Lu Bu entered Ding Yuan's service.
Her mother's dying wish: to live a life devoted to others.
Had her mother died of a lingering illness instead of at the tribesmen's hands, Lu Bu would surely have gone on living for herself and no one else.
But crushed beneath the guilt of having failed to protect the only blood kin who ever loved her, she buried the nature that coveted what belonged to others and lived, instead, by her mother's will.
She had failed to protect her mother in life; the least she could do was keep her promise beyond it.
Yet for the Lu Bu of those days, who had lived for herself alone, devotion was a riddle far beyond her solving.
In that light, the sight of Ding Yuan bestowing wealth and relief grain upon the people of Bingzhou became her finest reference point.
She accepted his offer of adoption partly in the hope that it might fill, even a little, the hollow left by her lost family.
And there was the debt besides — it was Ding Yuan who had taken her into his army and let her avenge her mother upon the tribesmen.
So for ten years after her mother's death, Lu Bu poured out her loyalty to her lord, transforming herself into a valiant general who fought for the people and lived, as best she could, by her mother's words.
In time came the Eight Elite Cavalrymen, who followed her out of faith in her martial prowess, and the common folk who hailed her as the hero of Bingzhou.
Her adoptive father cherished her in those days as well, treating her like his own flesh and blood. To a girl who had lost her father before she was old enough to remember him, Ding Yuan was, in every way that mattered, her real father.
Lu Bu, who had never once listened to her mother as a child, regretted those days bitterly — and so she honored Ding Yuan as the father she had failed.
Extolled as a hero who crushed bandits, she found a modest contentment in that small life, and believed her mother had been right all along.
And yet.
After coming to Luoyang, Lu Bu — lacking the political judgment to read the great board on which nations moved — began making all the wrong choices.
Ding Yuan, once he held power, grew blind with it and rotted from within; he began to slight and push away the very officers who had sworn their loyalty to him back in Bingzhou, Lu Bu included.
She failed to notice the change in him until it ran far too deep.
Even when she stood accused of conspiring with Han Yeong, indignation burned in her chest — but she swallowed it, bound by her mother's will to devote herself, and by the fact that she truly regarded Ding Yuan as her father.
And when Han Yeong sent her a Sweat-blood Horse and chests of treasure to win her over, her nature wavered for the space of a heartbeat — but she swung the Sky-Piercing Halberd to shake off the turmoil and drove Li Su from her sight.
Han Yeong had certainly shown the face of a worthy lord. But no one, she told herself over and over, could trust a man they had known for barely a single day.
And when Ding Yuan marched to a place that reeked of a trap, Lu Bu chose to see it as an opportunity.
A chance, she thought, to win back his trust and mend their fraying bond of father and daughter. So she rescued Cheng Lian and Wei Yue from their peril — and saved Ding Yuan into the bargain.
Then Han Yeong's army withdrew, and Ding Yuan — his power secure — rewarded Lu Bu and her men, whose lives he owed to her, with honors fit for the debt.
She complacently assumed that everything would return to the way it had been in Bingzhou.
Instead, Ding Yuan made the worst choice imaginable: pulling in the Black Mountain Bandits and the White Wave Bandits to fill out his depleted ranks.
The result was the free-for-all now plaguing Sili, with bandits rampaging unchecked across the province — and when Lu Bu pleaded with him to stop, Ding Yuan refused, claiming he had no standing to give orders to troops that were not his own.
Lu Bu had never been much of a thinker.
Caring for the people, serving the state — she did those things because her mother's will told her to, and because it felt right. That was the whole of it.
If she felt anything at all toward the people, it was only a vague kinship, born of her own past of tribesmen raids, and with it a dull pity.
Because she had never once stopped to ask herself why she did any of it, the conviction Lu Bu carried was nothing more than a dogma assembled from her mother's dying words.
And beneath it all lay the wound of losing her mother to foreign blades. Never — not once in ten years of regarding him as her own father — could she bring herself to cut Ding Yuan down with these hands.
Thanks to her restraint, Sili at least escaped being gutted by the bandits' wanton plunder. Yet not one soul in the province was grateful to her for it.
Pointed at and denounced by the people of Sili, pressed by the Eight Elite Cavalrymen to raise a banner against Ding Yuan, Lu Bu only dithered — putting off the decision, wavering.
'What on earth am I supposed to do...'
She thought it might be easier on her heart to simply die fighting.
On the day Ding Yuan fell into Han Yeong's trap, she had remembered the day she lost her mother, and regretted taking his side — yet even then she had not killed him with her own hands. Instead she had wracked her none-too-clever mind, groping for some way to end the carnage.
Han Yeong, who had posted notices across Yongliang Province calling for talent, was at the government offices meeting the men he had newly brought into service.
This round of recommendations had brought in one military officer and two civil officials. Unfortunately, among the martial applicants not one had distinguished himself in actual skill at arms — by Xu Rong and Yan Xing's account, the lot of them were all mouth and no spine.
The general before him, however, had shown rare talent for command and statecraft rather than personal combat, and it was Fa Zheng who had recommended him.
First, the two civil officials stepped forward.
"It is an honor to meet you, General Han Yeong."
A civil official with the seasoned air of a long career in office greeted me with a courteous clasped-fist salute.
"I am called Zheng Tai. I once served the court as Palace Attendant. My courtesy name is Gongye."
"A pleasure, Master Zheng Tai. I am Han Yeong."
Proper courtesy for receiving talent demanded nothing less, so I rose from my seat and returned the salute with clasped fists.
Zheng Tai, courtesy name Gongye.
To anyone who knew him only from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, he was a total nonentity — a man readers would ask, "Who the hell is this nobody?" about, so absent is he from the novel.
But he was the son of Zheng Zhong, a famous Confucian scholar, and a truly exceptional man — one of the few besides Cao Cao who foresaw that Dong Zhuo would seize power once He Jin fell.
He was a righteous man besides: when Dong Zhuo's tyranny and the forced move of the capital to Chang'an brought famine down upon the scholar-gentry, Zheng Tai emptied his family coffers to gather retainers and rescue the starving.
And the true value of this man, gifted in politics as well, lay in none other than the web of friendships he had cultivated.
For none other than Xun You — the leading strategist of Cao Cao's camp — and Hua Xin, who in the original history would rise to Grand Commandant and Minister over the Masses of Wei, were Zheng Tai's closest friends.
"Then tell me, Master Zheng — why would a man who serves the imperial court come to a place like this?"
"I hold no office now, so there is no need to honor me with 'Master.' And with Ding Yuan on one side and General Han Yeong on the other, is it not only natural that I should seek out the General?"
"How so?"
"It is obvious."
Zheng Tai answered without a flicker of hesitation, then turned to flay Ding Yuan with razor-sharp words.
"Ding Yuan is a man of savage temperament who used brute force to seize power absolute and unchecked. Neither the altars of state nor the people exist in his eyes. Is it not a scholar's proper duty to serve the man who can stop such a tyrant and set the state upright again?"
"......"
In the original history, Zheng Tai had warned He Jin never to summon Dong Zhuo. And when that counsel went unheeded, he had told Xun You flatly that serving He Jin was no better a mistake.
That directness, that refreshing bluntness — it reminded me a little of Fa Zheng.
"Unlike the worthies of Luoyang, who bowed their heads out of fear of Ding Yuan's power, you were the first to show where your righteous spirit lay — and thanks to you, the calamity of the Son of Heaven being replaced never came to pass. So tell me, is it not crystal clear whom I ought to serve?"
When he finished, Zheng Tai bowed his head once more.
"I beg you to take me in."
"Of course. You are more than welcome."
Once my civil administration was fully staffed, I could send Fa Zheng and Jia Xu out to the front — so capable civil officials I welcomed with both arms wide open.
'Asking about Xun You and Hua Xin right here would be poor manners, I suppose.'
'I'll arrange a separate occasion later and ask after where those two might be found.'
"General Han Yeong!!"
Just then, the second civil official bowed his head deeply.
A scholar who looked, in stark contrast to the seasoned Zheng Tai, a shade younger than even I was.
"Please, take me into your service!!"
He pleaded with such earnest desperation, head bowed low, his face burning with sincerity.
"My name is Yang Fu!! My courtesy name is Yishan!!"
At that name, my expression turned faintly complicated.
'To think that of all people, this one would come to enlist of his own accord.'
Yang Fu, courtesy name Yishan.
A talent I had been waiting for alongside Jia Xu — and in the original history, the strategist who, together with Cao Cao, brought about the slaughter of Ma Chao's family.