The Conquest of Chen — I
Five hundred and eighteen thousand troops in all, army and navy together, were to be thrown forward at once along the whole length of the Yangtze, that natural frontier and great wall between Sui and Chen.
This was no probing raid, and no token feint. The operational plan made it plain that the true object was the destruction of Chen itself. The Yangtze was hardly some neighborhood stream, and even for a Sui that had already unified North China, gripping it from the upper reaches to the lower was a staggering burden.
If—if, by some remote chance—we lost this war, the Yang clan's Mandate of Heaven would shake itself to pieces, just as Fu Jian's had when he went down in a blaze at the Battle of Fei River.
Not that it will come to that.
Of course we were not going to lose to the likes of Chen. Fu Jian had been the madman who slammed nearly a million men into the field while everyone around him begged him to stop. This time, the counselors gathered about Yang Jian had urged the southern campaign with one voice.
A war that anyone could see could only be won. An enemy so feeble it drew sneers rather than tension. A sovereign unfit to govern a single city, let alone an empire.
In actual history, did the fighting even last four months?
Four months. That was all it took to bring down a southern dynasty crouched along the Yangtze and swallow it whole. Set beside Northern Qi—Northern Zhou's old nemesis, which had held for two years under Yuwen Yong's assault—it was practically the speed of light.
A war. For the second time.
I had died in the twenty-first century precisely because I was a man at war, and now, in this life, I was being sent to war again. It stung. Leaving Lady Xiao and Teunteuni behind hurt badly enough to kill me. Our Teunteuni was not a child who would fuss at his mother, so I, his father, ought by rights to stay at the baby's side.
Before I knew it, I had begun to resent Chen Shubao, emperor of Chen, a man whose face I had never even seen. If the tide had turned this far, he ought to have had the sense to surrender. King Gyeongsun of Silla had yielded to Goryeo and, for his pains, enjoyed no small measure of rank, wealth, and glory.
"My lord."
"Ah—my lady."
I was in the middle of vowing that if Chen Shubao were taken alive I would tread on his feet a few times and call it an accident, when Lady Xiao came toward me on careful steps, her belly round and full.
"You ought to be lying down. Why have you come all the way out here?"
At the sight of her, the knot of regret and anger only swelled. I was to leave a wife at full term and go off on what amounted to a four-month business trip? What a wretched business.
"My lord departs thousands of leagues from here for the sake of all under heaven and all its people. How could I, your wife, simply lie here at ease? I wish to see you off, together with Teunteuni."
So saying, she drew nearer on those cautious feet and quietly took my hand.
"By His Majesty's grace, my kinsmen live here in peace. I will not be bringing Teunteuni into the world alone, so please do not trouble yourself over private matters. Set your mind upon the greater cause."
As she said, after the fall of Later Liang the people of the Xiao clan had come to Chang'an and were living in reasonable peace. A few had fled to Chen and were standing against Sui, but fortunately they were only a handful.
"I will return before Teunteuni begins to babble. I swear it."
"Yes, my lord. I shall wait with a glad heart."
A proper embrace was too much to ask of her, so I brushed a light kiss against her cheek. She flushed as if shy, and yet the wide, bright smile that opened across her face stayed with me.
The tramp of marching soldiers, the cheers of the common people, a heat that shook the heavens and set the earth to crying out.
Familiar. To Yang Jian, all too familiar—the same sound he had known in the days when he and Yuwen Yong brought those bastards of Qi to ruin.
If it is Guang, I can trust him.
Five hundred and eighteen thousand troops had been committed to this war. Forces from every quarter were still gathering at their assembly points, and the Campaign Marshals who would lead them had held their departure ceremony in Chang'an. Guang, Jun, and Yang Su. Of the three, the task of pressing the lower Yangtze and taking Jiankang had been given to Guang.
Guang, he could trust. Not for the boy's gift of command, but for that prudent, gentle nature.
A child who will listen to his generals, and give them his faith.
Because it was the most important front, he had attached outstanding commanders to Guang. He Ruobi, Area Commander-in-Chief of Wuzhou, and Han Qinhu, Area Commander-in-Chief of Luzhou, were brave men fully capable of forcing the Yangtze and entering Jiankang. He had also named Gao Jiong, Left Vice Director of the Department of State Affairs, as Marshal's Chief of Staff beneath Guang, so the fine work of strategy and command would fall to Gao Jiong. Guang need only hold his place as imperial kinsman and Campaign Marshal. No conspicuous exploits were required. Quietly. That was enough.
If there is a problem, it is Jun.
Unlike his elder brother Guang, that boy had a somewhat violent temper. Still, several generals had been placed under Jun as well; they would keep him in hand. Besides, the front assigned to him was of comparatively lesser weight. Even if something unforeseen arose, so long as Guang—who would strike at Jiankang—and Yang Su—who would lead the fleet the length of the Yangtze—remained sound, there would be no trouble at all.
"So they have gone, in the end."
"They have. There is no calling it back now."
He had been about to return to his work when the empress's voice turned his head. Unusually, her face was dark, her heart plainly unsettled. Long ago, when he had still hesitated even before the great cause, she had impressed upon him that he was a man already astride a beast, and that he could never climb down. An empress that resolute, that firm of will—and now she fretted as if she had caught her foot on a stone.
It was a hard decision.
Yang Jian understood her heart well enough. It had been a decision he himself had reached only after long deliberation. Guang was the second son, a mere two years younger than the Crown Prince. If the boy won the overwhelming military merit and the fame of completing the unification of all under heaven, he could threaten the Crown Prince's seat. But the Guang he had watched was not a man to covet what belonged to another. Was that not the conclusion drawn from scrutinizing every act and every word of these past few years?
A child who cherishes his family more than anyone.
And in a clan that had honored arms for generations, it was almost uncanny that such a boy should have appeared, practicing the teachings of Confucianism to the letter. Even those exacting, prickly civil officials sighed in admiration of Guang and did not stint their praise, calling him a model of what an imperial kinsman ought to be. And so he had always kept Guang in the imperial palace. He had withdrawn the plan to name him Area Commander-in-Chief of Bingzhou and send him north, and kept him in Chang'an instead. The profit of keeping a kinsman who lived by Confucian principle in the capital, he had judged, outweighed whatever might be gained by sending a prince to the northern frontier.
Sending such a boy south this time rested on a single expectation: that even if Guang won military merit, he would not harbor vain ambition.
"If the Crown Prince had been sound, we would never have had to wrestle with this."
And, as the empress said, the great enterprise could not be entrusted to the Crown Prince. Unlike the quiet, gentle Guang, the Crown Prince liked to take the lead, and he was lively. But his drive did not keep pace with his ability, nor did his character keep pace with either. Regrettably, he enjoyed thinking and acting for himself, and the results were seldom good.
Even if I attached generals to the Crown Prince, the odds are high he would ignore them.
In the end he, too, let a sigh escape, just as the empress had. Because the great enterprise could not be given to the Crown Prince, a younger brother was sent to the front. Did that even bear saying? And yet it had come to pass. Their house had to complete the great work of unifying all under heaven, and so a man of the Yang had to step forward; he himself could not leave Chang'an empty, and the Crown Prince could not be the one to go. In the end it was Guang who had been made to shoulder the taking of Jiankang.
Could there truly be a second emperor such as I?
A lamentable business. Since history began, had there been another emperor cast into circumstances so painful? If he followed his heart, he would have liked to strike the Crown Prince across the face a few times and roar at him. Had you only shown yourself fit, you might have sat where you were and gathered enormous honor—and what is this instead? Even so, he could not whittle down the Crown Prince's authority with the emperor's own hand. For now, even if the boy showed himself lacking, if he was soothed and taught with patience, Yang Jian believed the unripe Crown Prince would become a proper one.
He did not want to become Yuwen Yong, who had grasped all under heaven only to leave the world in vain. He did not want to vanish after entrusting everything to a whelp like Yuwen Yun.
...Even if it meant seeking a new road, rather than the one already laid.
The troops I was to command were assembling at Shouchun.
For any power holding the north bank of the Yangtze, Shouchun was a fit place to gather first and set its forces in order before attempting the crossing. And so Yang Jian had established the Huainan Branch Department of State Affairs there and appointed me its Branch Department Director.
The title was grand, but boiled down it meant a headquarters for the army of conquest against Chen, planted at Shouchun—a headquarters, moreover, empowered to exercise administrative authority over the surrounding region.
And the substance is just as grand.
Turned over that way, it was not only the name that was imposing.
"His Majesty places great expectations upon Your Highness. The Prince of Qin, who will keep the Chen army of the upper reaches from shifting downstream, and the Censor-in-Chief, who will lead the navy out of Bashu, will both press Chen ably enough. In the end, however, the one who enters Jiankang and takes Chen Shubao, lord of Chen, alive will be Your Highness."
And with those words from Gao Jiong, whom Yang Jian had attached to me as my adviser, the grandeur of the Huainan Branch Department swelled still further. He didn't need to say it. I could hardly fail to understand that I was the one meant to land the finishing blow on Chen and plant the Sui banner in the lands south of the river.
That was how it went in actual history, too.
The Conquest of Chen was the moment when Yang Guang, ambitious from childhood, first made his presence truly felt. Everyone knew Chen was a weakling that would collapse at a poke, and that its ruler, Chen Shubao, was trash-tier. Even so, no one could deny it was the last obstacle to unifying all under heaven, and the hero who brought Chen down would be the hero who unified the world. Even in an age when a subordinate's merit became his lord's achievement, the title of principal architect of that unification was no light thing.
And they're handing that to me?
At first I had wondered. Then it seemed they had made me a gift of it precisely because I was who I was. I was a mild, gentle prince who threatened no one. They trusted that even if a fellow like that became the architect of unification, the Crown Prince's footing would remain perfectly intact.
"Just as His Majesty, my imperial father, has trusted me with this great host, so I intend to trust in, and rely upon, the Marshal's Chief of Staff."
And I went further than the words. I abandoned any thought of leading the army myself. I would not flaunt my presence beyond what was needed. I would keep the name of architect of unification, but parcel the real credit out among the generals beneath me and thereby hold my own standing down. The Yang clan's Mandate of Heaven would be justified; the personal majesty of Yang Guang would be kept as low as it could go.
This is the best course.
Short of a prince actually deserting, this was the way that served everyone.
"Such trust is truly more than I deserve, and I am humbled by it. I shall be certain to repay it."
At my words Gao Jiong swept me with a quick look, then bowed his head and accepted that he would be, in substance, the Branch Department Director.
Good. I would trust him. Court craft I could not swear to, but ability and loyalty were certain in the man.
I had scarcely handed him real authority before a headache of a problem appeared.
"Your Highness! I beg you, grant me the vanguard! I will take alive the lord of Chen, shut up in Jiankang, and lay him before you!"
"No, Your Highness! I beg you—grant it to me!"
Oh.
The moment they heard I had entered Shouchun, He Ruobi and Han Qinhu had come tearing in at a mad pace. In their hearts they already counted themselves the leads of this Conquest of Chen, and now the celebrated generals who represented Sui were foaming at the mouth to demand the vanguard. Their reputations carried such weight that, before I laid eyes on them, I had pictured grave, charismatic men of middle years.
Grave?
Charisma I would have to strip away and judge for myself. Solemnity, I already knew, was nowhere near them.
"Your Highness!"
"Your Highness!"
When I held my silence, the two of them only raised their voices higher. I resented Gao Jiong for declaring this was not a matter he could decide and dumping it on me.
You bastard. I handed you the real power so you would deal with nuisances like this.