Chapter 90: The Coalition (4)
The coalition's council was anything but smooth sailing.
To begin with, the alliance leader was Yuan Shao, true to the history I remembered, with Cao Cao appointed chief strategist. Cao Cao's mastery of stratagem was famous throughout the realm, so no lord raised an objection—no one, that is, except Yuan Shu, who despised her and sneered at her for being born into a eunuch's household.
For my part, I had been named Liu Xie's guardian—partly as the living symbol of the anti-Ding Yuan coalition, partly at
her own request, and because the Xiliang cavalry's signature mobility meant my riders could be thrown into the fight wherever the battlefield demanded.
If it ever came to the point where I had to march out with the main force myself, I intended to leave five thousand men under Xu Huang to guard Liu Xie behind walls of iron.
Because who knew what fresh filth the provincial governors might get up to behind our backs while trumpeting their devotion to the imperial house.
In truth, this was something Liu Xie and I had discussed privately and settled before ever entering the coalition camp—a precaution against any politically motivated elements trying to get close to her.
Besides, a separate main force existed for the sole purpose of taking Luoyang. No reason for our army to bleed strength here.
Our objective was a feint: while the coalition held every eye in the realm, we would seize Hangu Pass and tighten the noose around Luoyang from the west.
Ma Chao, meanwhile, was to wait in the rear—and she thrust her lower lip out in a full sulk, still nursing her burning desire to wash away her defeat at Lu Bu's hands. Her head understood the strategy perfectly. Her warrior's heart, though, still hungered for a rematch against the Unrivaled Under Heaven, and watching her agonize over it struck me as so endearing that a snort of laughter slipped out before I could stop it.
Rear support and grain logistics had been assigned to Yuan Shu, but between that expression of bottled-up resentment he wore and his stingy, small-minded conduct, he would clearly bear watching.
The biggest problem, however, was the vanguard.
By the original course of history, that post should have gone to Sun Jian. Instead, the other lords of the Clear Stream faction were elbowing one another aside to volunteer for it—declaring, with Liu Xie watching right there before their eyes, that they would stand at the front of the army.
Bao Xin, glory-hungry even in the original Romance, I could let pass. But as for why the rest of the warlords were stepping forward...
It seemed that certain Clear Stream figures who had played no small part in handing Ding Yuan his grip on power in Luoyang were hoping to strike their sins from the ledger with a feat of arms.
Thanks to all the squabbling over the post, the debate dragged on and on, and in the end the vanguard went unassigned. By the time the council finally broke up, night had grown late, and the warlords drifted back to their respective barracks.
Honestly, the only reason the talks had run so absurdly long came down entirely to that bastard Yuan Shu and the endless bullshit that poured out of him. Every time one of the lords so much as breathed a word, he bristled, took offense at the least little thing, and threw his weight around like a man already sitting on the throne. Even Yuan Shao, the alliance leader, had pressed a hand to her forehead—visibly aching at his gift for stirring discord within the coalition.
But the man sat on a mountain of military supplies courtesy of the Runan Yuan clan's deep pockets, too slippery to cast aside, and so in her capacity as alliance leader she had no choice but to swallow it all.
THUD!!
Ma Chao, who had walked back to the barracks with me, drove her fist down onto the table and let her fury off its leash.
"Ugh, I'm so sick of this. That son of a bitch Yuan Shu—!!"
She ground her teeth at the haughty contempt with which he'd dismissed those of us born on the frontier.
"...Easy. Rage all you like—it only costs you."
"Well, it makes my blood boil!!"
She had stood at my back through the entire council as my guard, with a front-row seat to every one of Yuan Shu's arrogant antics, and now the fire was coming off her in waves. Midway through the session, Yuan Shu had made a point of provoking me by calling me a backwater hick from Xiliang—and each time he did, the hand gripping Ma Chao's spear had trembled behind me.
After the way he'd insulted our army going all the way back to Luoyang, she looked about one heartbeat away from taking his head then and there.
"I only ever knew him by rumor, but truly—the famed house of Four Generations and Three Excellencies has fallen just as far as the rest of them. A man with not a shred of personal merit, throwing tantrums like a spoiled brat, and that's the rightful heir of the Runan Yuans?"
Fa Zheng, who had never gone to Luoyang, was laying eyes on Yuan Shu for the first time—yet his conduct in the council alone was enough to draw pure venom off her tongue.
Four unbroken generations of ancestors seated among the Three Excellencies; wealth hoarded on a colossal scale; the standing to summon the most celebrated names in the realm into one's fold. And yet Yuan Shu, the trueborn heir, spent that entire inheritance on exactly one thing—grinding other people's faces in it for a cheap, shabby thrill of superiority.
The two of them, it seemed, had grievances aplenty about Yuan Shu's behavior.
"He's arrogant because he grew up in Luoyang being waited on hand and foot as the young master of a great house."
For all his present reputation as a petty little man, Yuan Shu as a boy had actually been a dashing, chivalrous knight-errant—a young hero whose name carried real weight. But after setting Sun Jian up as his vanguard and riding the great victories of the campaign against Dong Zhuo, he began to disgrace himself again and again, sliding down and down into the pit.
With Sun Jian dead, he took a shattering defeat at Cao Cao's hands, lost his hold on Jing Province, and began his long flight toward Jiangdong. The final act was usurping the imperial throne, which turned lord after lord against him until he stood utterly alone in the world.
Even the Sun clan—the last family still at his side—threw him over the moment they'd been waiting for, after all his faithlessness capped by the usurpation. Zhou Yu and Lu Su, too: Yuan Shu had sought them out one by one with offers of position, but each judged from his conduct that he was not long for this world, declined with a polite excuse, and went to serve under Sun Ce instead.
Had he shown real generosity to the fatherless Sun Ce, and never once betrayed another's trust, the Kingdom of Wu might have been Yuan Shu's making.
What galled me was that I couldn't kill him here and now.
One look at him jabbing his finger in people's faces and running that filthy mouth had murder climbing up my throat all on its own.
My heart said kill him. But Yuan Wei was in Luoyang, about to die at Ding Yuan's hands—and the Central Plains were thick with famous scholars and house guests who pitied the Runan Yuans, Yuan Shu included, or outright wished them well. If I killed him, the word would go out that the lawless thugs of Xiliang had slaughtered that clan's rightful bloodline, and the scholars and notables would turn their faces from me forever.
At the very least, I'd have to leave him be until that bastard either invaded our lands first or pulled something vile enough to turn the Central Plains' opinion against him.
Until Honey Water over there crossed into our territory, or tried to crown himself emperor, the watching eyes of the world made him a man I could not lightly touch. In a word: untouchable.
"My lord."
In the middle of our post-mortem on Yuan Shu, a voice sounded from outside the tent. It was Pang De, who had stepped away to supervise the troops.
"Forgive me for disturbing your rest, my lord, but might I come in for a moment?"
"Of course. Come in."
At my word, Pang De entered the war tent and bowed her head.
"Visitors have arrived asking for you, my lord."
"Who is it? Cao Cao?"
"No, my lord—strangers to me. And they asked to see General Ma Chao as well, along with you."
"Me too?... The hell? Who on earth are these people?"
At the news that someone had come looking for her as well, Ma Chao tilted her head in puzzlement.
"Their skin was a burnished copper, quite unlike ours—I would judge they're no Central Plains men. And they made no effort to hide their eagerness to test themselves, just once, against General Ma Chao of whom they'd only heard tales."
Copper skin, they say?
At those words, I ran back through the lords seated in the council that day—and remembered that Sun Jian's skin, too, had carried a faint bronze sheen.
Someone wanted to cross blades with her? Ma Chao's competitive fire roared up at once.
"Who is this guy? I'll head over right now—"
Up off her seat and spear already in hand, she made for the tent flap, and I rose to follow at her back.
"...No, wait. Hold on. I'm coming with you. Something about this smells off to me."
With me stepping out, the others fell in behind us, and the whole company moved up to the camp gate.
At the entrance to the fortified camp where Han Yeong was stationed, a young man and a young woman were going at each other hammer and tongs.
"Have you lost your mind?!!"
"...Look, I just wanted to see them once. This Han Yeong fellow runs a warlord's domain even though he's younger than me, and Splendid Ma Chao is supposed to be the strongest general in the entire coalition. Of course I'm curious!!"
Sun Ce's curiosity about Han Yeong and Ma Chao ran bone-deep. Han Yeong commanded a force even greater than his own father's, and word had it that—just like Sun Ce—he had stepped onto a battlefield the moment he came of age. As for Ma Chao: she had gone up against Lu Bu, the woman hailed as Unrivaled Under Heaven, and though she lost, she walked away alive. Before ever facing Lu Bu himself, she was exactly the opponent he hungered to test.
"You absolute madman!! Do you seriously think it's acceptable to charge through another lord's camp gate unannounced at this hour of the night?!"
Zhou Yu raked her childhood friend—practically her sworn brother—over the coals for his recklessness.
"B-but Father was singing Han Yeong's praises, saying a lord younger than me had real daring, so I got curious about Splendid Ma Chao's skill too..."
"...Haah. Unbelievable."
Just then—
"So it's you? The one dying to meet us?"
Ma Chao stepped into view with Han Yeong and the rest of the generals behind her.
One of the two visitors wore a face so strikingly like Sun Jian's that I had his identity the moment I laid eyes on it.
No mistaking it. That's Sun Ce.
There was nothing strange in that. Given that Sun Ce had been born a year before Ma Chao, he was likely a year our senior—just turned twenty, freshly a man. Him joining the anti-Ding Yuan coalition raised no eyebrows at all. The surprise was simply that he wasn't a woman.
"Huh, you look like you've got some real grit. Good. Come on then, let's go a round—"
"Enough."
I clapped a hand over Ma Chao's mouth mid-taunt and addressed the two before me.
"You would be General Sun Jian's son, then?"
"...Ah—yes. I am called Sun Ce."
Young as he was, he seemed to know full well that his father and I stood as equals among the coalition's lords, because outwardly, at least, he rendered a proper bow. Even as he bowed, though, those eyes of his swept up and down over me, taking my measure like an appraiser at a horse fair. Not that marching into another man's camp to demand a duel was the height of courtesy to begin with.
"...And I am called Zhou Yu."
A beauty with long hair touched with blue, spilling down past her shoulders to lend her a calm, scholarly air, lowered her head in greeting.
Where Sun Ce was, Zhou Yu was too—of course she'd come along.
The Little Conqueror who would one day lay the cornerstone of the Kingdom of Wu, and the Beautiful Zhou Yu who would strangle Cao Cao's dream of unifying the realm in its cradle at Red Cliffs. I would have liked nothing more than to sit down with two talents of this caliber and talk at leisure, but the hour was far too late, so I resolved to send them on their way for now.
"You say you wish to cross blades with Ma Chao, but the night is far too advanced for a bout. Shall we leave it to another day? We march on Sishui Pass tomorrow, after all."
"Well, that's—"
"Yes!! We sincerely beg your pardon for intruding at this late hour!!"
Zhou Yu clamped onto the head of Sun Ce just as he opened his mouth to object, wrung a bowing apology out of him by force, and marched him straight off home.
"...Hmph. For all Father's praise, he wasn't exactly brimming with fight. Not so impressive after all..."
"Quiet!!"
Smacking the back of Sun Ce's head before he could air any more of his first impressions, Zhou Yu hauled him off bodily toward the Sun army's encampment.
"What in the world was that about... those two?"
Watching the pair vanish as though a whirlwind had swept through, Ma Chao and the other generals wore openly dumbfounded looks.
Sun Ce, is it...
A first impression with a touch of insolence to it, certainly—but this was our first meeting, far too early to pass judgment. Watching Sun Ce's bearing and that hungry, combative streak of his, I turned the man over quietly in my mind.