Are You Zhang Lan?
Once the wager was struck, nothing remained but to settle who won and who lost.
I lifted the sword I had been letting hang, and Chubaek drew the blade slung across her back. She bent slightly at the waist and stretched her arm out long to clear the scabbard, and the motion was so graceful she might have been a dancer called forth to perform a sword dance.
A dancer by training, then.
There was no talk at all of who would strike first. The moment the sword was fully drawn, Chubaek came straight at me. Her steps were light as a cat's, but the blade that fell was heavy.
Clang!
Iron met iron. Both swords were live blades, their edges honed—no practice weapons with the edge beaten dull for a spar. A bout fought with steel that could part flesh and bone and take a life was closer to real combat than to practice.
Even under the pressure of fighting with live blades, Chubaek did not so much as tremble. She did not seem to have seen actual battle. Perhaps the maids used real swords even when they sparred among themselves.
The initiative belonged to Chubaek. She unleashed short, rapid combinations, like a swordsman out of some Chinese martial-arts film I had once watched. At a glance those concise, driving cuts looked like nothing but flash, empty of any practical worth—yet once you were forced onto the defensive, they were surprisingly hard to slip. It was like sneering at the wild downward hacking of the Japanese school Jigen-ryu, only to have your skull split the moment you actually stood in front of it.
But that judgment of mine held only against an opponent of roughly equal skill. It would never land on someone stronger than oneself.
I would show her that now.
Tang!
The ring of the steel had changed. Until that moment I had focused only on blocking; the instant I drew my strength up in earnest and shoved hard, Chubaek's balance broke. I could have finished her then and there with a Zwerchhau, a cut with the short edge, but I let her recover her stance and fall back.
Failing to notice that I had spared her, Chubaek seemed to take it for her own mistake and sprang in again as swiftly as the first time.
Kraaang!
A Scheitelhau—a cut driven straight down from overhead, dead on from the front—came crashing over her.
"Kh—!"
A groan slipped from Chubaek as she took the vertically falling sword head-on.
Women mature faster than men. That is true. And this body of mine grows in the image of my father, Zhang Fei. That is also true. But Zhang Fei can by no means be called an ordinary man. That, too, is true.
She had already died once to technique in my counter, and now she was utterly crushed in a contest of pure strength. Her arms, shaking so badly she could barely keep hold of the sword, gave out the moment I bore down on the blade locked against hers, and the weapon fell from her hands.
Clatter.
The pitiful ring of a sword striking the stones of the rear garden echoed through the silence.
When my blade touched her throat, Chubaek hung her head. I turned my eyes from her, met Lady Sun's gaze, and spoke.
"Take care on your way."
Shring.
I spun the sword that had rested at Chubaek's throat and slid it home into the scabbard. Yeoni, who had been watching from the side in an agony of nerves, only then came pattering over and threw her arms tight around my waist.
"Sister! You were incredible!"
"So. Were you worried?"
"N-no? I knew you'd win!"
For someone who claimed she hadn't worried because she was certain of my complete victory, the rims of Yeoni's eyes had gone quite red. There were no tear tracks, but the claim that she hadn't worried was a lie. She was only hiding it, so as not to burden me with concern. Young as she was, my little sister had a deep consideration for others.
Lady Sun, who had been quietly watching our exchange, opened her mouth.
"Indeed……."
She closed her eyes for a moment, then bowed her head to me. It was not the full courtesy of joining both hands and bending all the way to the waist, but the mere lowering of her head was enough to leave the maids looking stricken. Honestly—how arrogant must she have been, for a bow that slight to shock them?
"I begin to understand why Zhou Lang wished to take you as a daughter-in-law. I apologize for the discourtesy I offered the Governor of Nan Commandery."
"I accept your apology gladly, my lady."
Lady Sun and I would part soon enough, but with the alliance in mind it seemed best to close the matter here. When I returned her courtesy in kind and accepted the apology, she lifted her head and asked a question.
"There is something I wish to know. When you first stopped Chubaek's attack—were you taking the measure of the child's skill?"
"Yes. I have had little chance to meet others my own age, so I meant to learn, through the Chubaek you praised so highly, just where the skill of my generation stands."
"Then why did you not end it with the first counter?"
As expected, Lady Sun had seen through the fact that I had deliberately let Chubaek go. Chubaek, who had not known, stared at me with eyes gone perfectly round, as if to ask whether it was true.
I answered honestly.
"Bravado."
"Bravado? From you?"
"The bravado of being Zhang Fei's daughter."
Perhaps the remark—that one need only look at me to know Zhang Fei's measure—had stuck in my craw. I had crushed her with strength, as if to boast of Zhang Fei's power.
"So there is a childish corner to you after all. Even if I called you into my service, you would not come, would you?"
When my silence affirmed it, Lady Sun said she had thought as much.
"Of course. You who refused even Zhou Lang—how much more readily would you refuse me. We are leaving."
"Yes, my lady."
"Th-then, my lady, I…"
Chubaek called after her in a pitiful voice as she made to leave, but Lady Sun was merciless.
"Have you forgotten? From now on you are to attend not me, but that child."
"…Yes, my lady."
Leaving the crestfallen Chubaek behind, Lady Sun departed without a backward glance, as abruptly as she had come—having left her pledge that she would break no more of Jing Province's laws, and having left Chubaek.
How am I supposed to clean up after this…
Word of what had passed between Lady Sun and me would no doubt be circulating among the common people before long. Between the manor's servants and Lady Sun's maids, there were more than a hundred people. Even if every one of their mouths were stopped, should Lady Sun keep to the terms of our wager, those who found her conduct suspicious would start digging—and then what had happened with me would come out regardless. I would take the spread of the anecdote as a given, and aim only at settling the false rumors.
The fake news has to go.
This was an age when facts were hard to verify. A single rumor was unlikely to crack an alliance, but there was no sense in picking at a scab for nothing.
"That settled—Chubaek, was it?"
When I called, she answered me dutifully, though her face was wilted.
"Yes, Lady Zhang Lan."
"When my parents return, I will have to introduce you. If the two of them will not accept you, I will send you back to Lady Sun. If my father speaks, even she will not refuse."
"N-no. My lady entrusted me to you, Lady Zhang Lan. The one I am to follow now is not my lady, but you."
"Is that so? Then first we should do something about that form of address. And smooth out that expression. The way you look, it feels as though I stole you from Lady Sun for no good reason."
Chubaek started and waved her hands in a flurry.
"It isn't that! I—well, my older sisters are one thing, but I had never lost to anyone my own age… that's all it is. Never you, Lady Zhang Lan—no, I mean…"
"I haven't been given a courtesy name yet, so for now just call me Lan."
"It is not that I dislike serving Lady Lan. Please do not say such things."
Crestfallen over the first defeat she had ever suffered, Chubaek at last looked like a child of her age.
"Heh. All right, I understand. Then you'll have to greet my parents properly later. I doubt they will turn you away."
"Yes, Lady Lan."
"Yeoni, will you say hello too? It looks as though the two of you will be living together from now on."
I still had no one I could call a maid of my own. I did not go about dressed up like the young ladies of noble houses; I was too busy following Zhang Fei to the camps or honing my martial arts. A maid—what would I even do with one?
Still, someone of Chubaek's level will do as a sparring partner. Not bad.
I watched the two girls, Yeoni and Chubaek, exchange their greetings, and thought that I was about to get busy again.
"My lady, will you truly be all right?"
A maid asked Lady Sun once they had left Zhangjiazhuang, the Zhang family manor. The meaning in the question was plain enough: she feared this affair would remain a shameful anecdote hanging over her mistress.
Lady Sun—Sun Lin—knew the maid's worry full well, and snorted.
"Hmph. What, are you telling this Sun Lin to say one thing and do another?"
"Th-that is not what I meant……."
"Enough. More to the point—is she not an interesting child?"
"My lady?"
"That child called Zhang Lan. However did she come to think that way?"
Sun Lin's voice was distant, steeped in regret. Her eyes were turned upon the past, and in her ears, before she knew it, her father's voice rang as it had since she was small.
"A woman entering the ranks of the army. A story I gave up on early. I never once beat my elder brothers."
"My lady……."
The maid who had stood at her side since childhood could feel the regret woven through those words.
"If my brothers had been weak—like that child… would I have gone to the battlefield?"
The difference between a man's body and a woman's is, of course, great. But that did not mean Sun Lin could never defeat a man. Weapons exist precisely so that the limits of sex can be overcome, and her own physical ability—trained while she ate her fill, unlike common soldiers who had never been properly fed—was no thin margin a rank-and-file man could close by virtue of his sex alone.
And yet the reason she had abandoned the path of a warrior was simply this.
"I lacked the courage. I hated being pointed at. I quit because I was afraid of being condemned for being a woman."
But Zhang Lan was different. Sun Lin saw in her a mirror of herself. Zhang Fei, called a match for ten thousand, and Sun Jian, called the Tiger of Jiangdong—daughters born of peerless gods of war without equal in all the realm; a similar bond of siblings, with elder brothers set above them; and even the peculiarity of aiming at the martial way despite having been born women. If there was a difference, perhaps it was only that her own brothers had been so strong they inherited their father's martial line, while Zhang Lan's brothers had not.
But in the end, the resolve to endure the pointing fingers—for taking up a sword rather than a comb, though she was a woman—had been Zhang Lan's own heart.
"I want to see it."
She had called it bravado. The bravado of showing the world that she was Zhang Fei's daughter.
"When she comes of age."
As time passed, the girl would fall behind. Good blood, good nourishment, a good education—she could surpass common soldiers easily enough. But men who had grown up under those very same conditions? Even as an adult, could she truly win?
Together with an ugly envy that wished the girl would give up as she herself had, and submit to a woman's life, Sun Lin hoped. She hoped that, unlike herself, Zhang Lan would make her name proudly as a heroine and become a general who astonished the Central Plains.
Holding that contradictory hope, Sun Lin looked back at the Zhang family manor.
"I shall look forward to it."
Zhang Lan.