Values (3)
At Han Yeong's blunt, straight-to-the-point question, Liu Bei closed her eyes for a moment and sank into memory.
She could still see the people of You Province, dying in droves beneath the Yellow Turbans' onslaught.
Under the tyranny of court officials led by the Ten Attendants, the gulf between rich and poor had widened by the day; the state had rotted through until it no longer spared its people a thought. And so Zhang Jiao, vowing to raise a new heaven, had founded the Yellow Turbans and plunged the realm into rebellion — only for his movement to curdle into a rabble bent on nothing but its own ambitions.
With the state itself reeling beneath the bandits' ravages, Liu Bei had sworn sisterhood with Guan Yu and Zhang Fei in the Peach Garden, gathered a volunteer army, and risen with the noble resolve to defend the realm.
To strike down the villainous bandits who had thrown the world into chaos.
It had never been done in hope of reward — no lofty office, no exalted rank. Only from loyalty to the state, and from the wish that no more of its people should suffer at the hands of the Yellow Turbans, men who had abandoned their original purpose and righteous cause to become mere brigands.
Along the way, General Lu Zhi — who had poured out his devotion and loyalty for the state — was stripped of his command, and though court men like Dong Zhuo and their ilk sneered at her forces as mere "volunteers," she paid it little mind.
She had won towering merit in sweeping the Yellow Turbans away, and for all of it received nothing grander than the post of county commandant of Anxi County — and still she paid it little mind.
She had driven back the Yellow Turbans who had held the world in terror, and the devotion itself had been satisfaction enough.
But when the inspector — an official charged with overseeing the counties — came calling and set about his outrages, Liu Bei found herself doubting, for the first time, whether the path of quiet devotion to the state was truly right.
The people, battered by the Yellow Turbans, could barely scrape together enough to eat; yet the inspector, sheltered by the court, swaggered about with coercive menace, bellowing at her to hand over bribes. And when she refused, he did not stop there — he invented crimes to slander her, and perhaps coveting her looks, even tried his hand at lewd advances.
Had her sworn sister Zhang Fei not come bursting in, who could say whether Liu Bei — her temper straining at its final thread — might not have thrown the punch herself and beaten the man within an inch of his life?
She had struck a court official, resigned her post, and gone home — and there Liu Bei sank into long thought.
What was the world she truly wished for... and was there, anywhere near her, a warlord capable of building it?
Her sworn elder brother Gongsun Zan — hero of the You Province frontier, his name ringing out as the White Horse General — was not the great man who could bring about the world Liu Bei longed for.
He had repelled the barbarians pressing in from the north and won his fame — but having studied under the same master, she knew his temperament all too well. Superb in arms and horsemanship, Gongsun Zan looked after his own people well enough, yet for the common folk whose hearts he had won in the campaigns against the tribesmen, he had not a shred of regard.
Had he been a righteous warlord who held his people in his heart, Liu Bei might have stayed at his side and spent her life assisting him. Sadly, that was never to be.
Then, at last, came word that an Anti-Ding Yuan Coalition was forming to wrest the Emperor from the traitor's grasp — and Liu Bei judged it a fine opportunity.
...A gathering where the most renowned lords and heroes of the realm would assemble to strike down the traitor.
She had caught herself wondering, quite suddenly, whether the man she sought — one who truly stood for the people — might be found there.
Among them, one figure drew her keen interest: Han Yeong. A warlord who, though not yet twenty, had stood up to Ding Yuan as he trampled the imperial house, shielded the late Emperor's own flesh and blood, and finished off Dong Zhuo — the very man who had scorned and reviled her as a mere "volunteer." Rumor even had it that for years he had been crushing the rebels who plagued Liang Province while dealing kindly with its people; it would have been stranger if she had not taken notice.
So when she heard that Cao Cao — with whom she had crossed paths briefly during the Yellow Turban Rebellion — would be joining the coalition, she laid her plans to enter it through her. She nearly found the door shut in her face by Yuan Shu and his obsession with pedigree, but Han Yeong, who judged their cause worthy, saw them past the crisis.
And so, sworn sisters in tow, she had attended the coalition councils from a corner seat as Cao Cao's guest commander — and come away bitterly disappointed. For all their righteous banner of "For the Han," the lords gathered there nursed an uglier ambition: to cast off the central court and raise their armies as masters of their own regions. There was Yuan Shu, who judged every man by birth and office alone; and the Clear Stream warlords, who looked every inch the dignified magnates yet burned with envy at any merit won by another. At the battle of Sishui Pass, the lords had weighed loss against profit in their heads and hung back from the fighting — conduct that, from where she stood, was more than enough to knot her brow.
But...
Han Yeong had been different.
No one would have censured him for holding his march back under the pretext of guarding Liu Xie, yet unlike the other lords with their ledgers of profit, he had stepped forward without hesitation — and he had even looked after her and her sisters, whom nobody else deigned to notice. To Liu Bei, who had watched court officials hog every last scrap of credit, it was a breath of fresh air.
That was why she had asked to share his table — to learn what sort of man he was beneath the surface.
Having heard Han Yeong's answer and received his question in turn, Liu Bei now gave the reply she had carried with her since the day she first raised her army.
"I raised my volunteer army for the people who suffered beneath the Yellow Turbans."
It was an abrupt turn into old history, but Han Yeong listened to her story in attentive silence.
"Even if I never received the reward I was due for putting down the Yellow Turbans, I have no regrets. It was something I did for the people who suffered at those bandits' hands."
Liu Bei lifted her head with dignity and let a benevolent smile spread across her face.
"I, too — like you, General — have come to raise my banner and muster an army for the sake of the people."
"...I see."
I, too, found that answer satisfying, and raised my cup to her.
Afterward, her own force being rather meager for a guest commander under Cao Cao, she readily agreed when I asked whether she would come to my army and take command of my soldiers.
And so the hastily arranged drinking party came to an end. Guan Yu, having draped a blanket over Zhang Fei — dead drunk and sprawled flat — drew near Liu Bei.
"Sister."
"What is it, Yunchang?"
Guan Yu wished to hear how the man called Han Yeong had appeared through Liu Bei's eyes; in martial prowess Liu Bei might lag behind the other two, but when it came to seeing through a person's heart, no one alive could stand beside her.
"What think you of the General Who Pacifies the West?"
"And how does he look to your eyes, Yunchang? You shared drinks with General Han Yeong's officers, after all."
At Liu Bei's counter-question, Guan Yu gave her honest assessment.
"If I may speak my mind, his character itself seems far from poor. Unlike the other lords, whose ranks were nothing but chaos, his soldiers are well-drilled and refined, and his officers, moreover, seem to repose deep trust in this warlord, Han Yeong."
Guan Yu herself showed kindness freely to her common soldiers, yet she regarded the scholar-gentry with a settled prejudice — finding them arrogant — and thought none too well of the court's high officials.
Ma Chao, blazing with the dread epithet Splendid Ma Chao and making her name across the Central Plains, was bound to Han Yeong all the more closely as his childhood friend — that much was plain; but Pang De too, quiet and unassuming, carried a deep, unspoken loyalty toward him.
"...Mm. He is a good man. His care for the people runs deep, and he thinks seriously about the future of the Han."
Younger than she was, yes — but Liu Bei judged that he possessed a thoughtfulness toward the people beyond his years, and the maturity to see the Han's ills clearly and set about curing them. A man who had wrought such deeds in the frontier lands of Liang and Yong deserved, she felt, to be honored as a warlord in his own right — and so she made a point of addressing him with the respect he had earned.
Yuan Shu might sneer at him from start to finish as a green boy not yet of age, but in Liu Bei's eyes, Han Yeong had the makings of a true ruler. He was hardly a man Yuan Shu — who sipped honeyed water and wallowed in luxury and pleasure even midwar — had any right to revile.
And yet...
The image of Han Yeong as he posed his question, watching her closely, weighing her every answer. Had she answered wrongly in that moment, perhaps he would have let the friendship go no further.
Liu Bei, so adept at reading what lay behind men's faces, suspected that Han Yeong, like Cao Cao, had an unexpectedly dark streak. A man who had let Dong Zhuo die a miserable death at the hands of the populace was certainly no gentle lamb.
Not that he seems to know it himself... Perhaps Cao Cao treats General Han Yeong so familiarly because she senses how quietly alike the two of them are.
She let the thought run its course, then shook her head, brushed it away, and turned instead to an old memory. She was too young to recall it herself, but by her mother's telling, the enormous mulberry tree in the family yard had looked to the child like the canopy of an imperial carriage — and the girl had once shouted her ambition to become Emperor someday and ride a carriage just that grand.
For now, Liu Bei nursed no such ambition. Had none of the lords proved to be the one she sought, the notion that she must take the throne herself might well have taken root; but at least among the warlords, there was one worth pinning her hopes on. For the present she wanted simply to watch him for a while, close at hand — and so Liu Bei accepted the post of Han Yeong's guest commander.
Cao Cao, having turned down the supper invitation from Han Yeong and Liu Bei, was at that very hour sitting with Yuan Shao.
"Mengde. Does it not seem to you that the General Who Pacifies the West's authority is growing too great?"
Seated in the alliance leader's chair, Yuan Shao paid deep heed to Han Yeong's ever-widening standing and the course of his movements. Back in Luoyang she had maintained a fairly cordial stance — introducing him to her connections and the like — but now he was a member of her own coalition who could just as easily be called a rival contending for power.
He had even helped push her forward as alliance leader, so for now he remained a friendly force; yet he had taken Prince of Fufeng Liu Xie under his wing and won towering credit for the fall of Sishui Pass — and as his political influence swelled with each step, Yuan Shao let her vigilance show in her own measure. Unlike Yuan Shu and the other lords, she bore him no personal grudge — their hands had even joined — but for the sake of her own designs and ambitions, Yuan Shao kept him at arm's length all the same.
Cao Cao, after all, was Yuan Shao's old friend and a commander who fought beneath her banner — hardly a rival in her eyes — and it was precisely because of that trust that Cao Cao had sought out this private meeting, to shape her response to Han Yeong's rise.
To outward eyes, the two were close friends on equal footing; look closer, though, and Yuan Shao seemed to treat Cao Cao, however subtly, as a woman serving under her command. And Cao Cao herself knew it very well.
"Did he not yield the vanguard for Hulao Pass to the other lords? I'd say that settles it — and it is not as though he parades the Prince of Fufeng before him to borrow his authority."
Feigning a neutral stance, Cao Cao quietly slipped a shield around Han Yeong.
Because of the weakness of her concubine-born origins, Yuan Shao nurtured a black-hearted ambition: to claw her way to the highest seat and wield an omnipotent power that no one would dare belittle. To Cao Cao, Yuan Shao — black to the core beneath the gilt — was a rival.
"...Very well. Should the General Who Pacifies the West show any suspicious movements, inform me at once."
Finding Cao Cao's argument not without reason, Yuan Shao brought the secret meeting to a close and returned to her tent.
"...Hm. Good grief, Benchu. I have no intention of dancing to the tune you've set."
Watching Yuan Shao's receding back on the way to the barracks, Cao Cao murmured the words under her breath.