Is the Bird of Chaos Preparing to Take Flight?
This was the heart of it. That was the feeling that settled over me. It was not as if no one had ever asked me such a thing before.
Even the officers who had been well disposed toward me had inquired, lightly, as if the question were only passing through, whether I meant to follow the army again. Among the scholars there were those who took my campaigning for a brief lapse and prayed that from now on I would become a gentle, virtuous woman.
Pan Jun was not like them. He did not set his own answer down and then try to instruct me in it. He had the air of a man who meant to argue.
I saw no reason to hide, and so I told him exactly what I thought.
"Yes. I am still training, even now."
"I heard that you passed through a brush with death back then, my lady. Even so?"
How does one forget the terror of death? However many screws I might have loose, the fear of dying had not fallen out with them. I am afraid to die. I hate pain, and I am no slaughter-mad killer who takes pleasure in ending lives.
"Yes. Even so."
Even so, I still wanted the battlefield. I wanted the chance to make my name resound—a chance to cry to the world, without shame, that I had lived.
What had I been in my previous life? Without worth, without so much as a remnant to show that an I had existed in that world, I had drifted like duckweed and come to an empty end. There had been a beginning and no ending, and everything between had scattered into meaninglessness.
This time would be different. I would carve myself into the world. I would shout it outward: that I had been here. The histories would record me. People would remember me. The tracks I pressed into the earth would pass down the generations and stand as proof that I had existed.
For that, I had to become a general. And someday, as Napoleon once had, I would say it—that the age of chaos was over.
What I had spoken was a kind of vow. It was an answer to Pan Jun's question, and at the same time a monologue I was binding upon myself.
"That," said Pan Jun, breaking his silence, "is contrary to principle."
To call a thing contrary to principle was to say it went against the natural order—that it defied the rule Heaven had fixed.
"You mean my wish to enter the army?"
Pan Jun nodded, and the words came pouring out.
"The Book of Changes teaches that to bear a son is the Way of Qian, and to bear a daughter the Way of Kun; that the hexagram Qian is yang, and the hexagram Kun is yin. Thus a man sets his place aright outside, and a woman sets her place aright within, and the great righteousness of Heaven and Earth is precisely this. How, then, holding the hexagram Kun, can my lady seek to follow yang?"
Taking his stand on the Book of Changes—the Confucian classic otherwise called the Yijing—Pan Jun was arguing that my conduct ran contrary to principle.
I learned it only later, but his teacher, Song Zhong, was a brilliant Confucian, especially esteemed for his commentary on the Changes. That Pan Jun should reach, out of all the classics, for that one was surely in part his master's influence.
Either way, no matter which classic he set before me as grounds, I could not follow him onto that field. The Zhang Lan of the days before I remembered my past life might have looked through a few volumes, but all I truly retained were the Analects and Mencius, and even those fell far short of a real dispute with a genuine scholar. What I could do was catch at a loose thread in his own words and pull a contradiction out of it.
"Do you mean, Attendant Pan, that a man must see only to outside affairs, and a woman only to those within?"
"I do."
I smiled and asked, "Is work in the kitchen an inside affair, or an outside one?"
"An inside affair."
"Then if a wife at her inside work should blunder and start a fire, must the husband, because it is an inside matter, simply stand and watch?"
"……"
Pan Jun could not readily find an answer, and he hesitated. By the rule he himself had laid down, the husband was a man, and so he must not meddle in a fire born of women's work. But a fire is a hard thing for a woman to put out alone. This age had no fire brigade set apart for the task.
Sure enough, his reply was exactly what I had expected.
"A fire is a matter on which the fortunes of the house depend. The husband must help put it out."
"The present age of chaos is the same."
The turmoil that had begun in earnest with the Yellow Turban Rebellion was still going on, more than twenty years later. Cao Cao, who had stood within sight of unifying the realm, had gone down at Red Cliffs. The alliance of Liu and Sun had the wind behind it, and Xiliang and Yizhou still held their strength. That the torn continent would gather into one again was a story still decades off, and even that brief peace would not last long before the fiercer chaos of the Five Barbarians and the Sixteen Kingdoms came down.
In a history warped by my being here, events might not run that course. But if I sat still, nine times out of ten they would follow the history I knew. If the great righteousness the Confucians spoke of—the Principle of Heaven—was truly the ending of chaos and the opening of a great peace, then to break a will that did not shrink even from death in that cause would itself be the thing contrary to principle. A husband who rolls up his sleeves to quench a fire clinging to his house is not wrong. Neither was I wrong to give myself to the army in order to end the age of chaos.
It was a thin argument. Perhaps Pan Jun had never come to break my will in the first place, for he nodded without resistance.
"Then become a lesser yang, my lady."
"A lesser yang?"
"Yes. The natural order is the Great Ultimate. The Great Ultimate divides into yin and yang, and these are man and woman. Yin and yang each divide again into yin and yang, and those are the Four Images."
The Four Images I knew well enough. Any Korean has heard, at least once, of Lee Je-ma's medicine of the four constitutions: the teaching that people must be divided into greater-yang, greater-yin, lesser-yang, and lesser-yin types, and prescribed for each in their own way.
"From yin come greater yin and lesser yang, and so lesser yang is the yang within yin."
"Just so. You have read the Changes, I see."
It was not the Changes. It was a drama about Lee Je-ma. My conscience stung me, and I could not bring myself to claim otherwise, so I turned the talk aside.
"Why give me advice like this?"
"It hardly deserves to be called advice. Anyone might say it."
"And yet you are the only one who has come to me in person to say it, Attendant Pan."
"Haha. Was I?"
He laughed, a little awkward. Embarrassed, though not displeased, he went on with care.
"It is an apology for having judged you wrongly, and a reflection on my own eye."
"You thought I was a girl dashing about with no sense of direction."
"…Yes. I am ashamed to say it."
"It's all right. Everyone will think so. You were ashamed enough to come yourself, Attendant, but I have not seen another person do the same."
I had heard that even after surrendering he had wept for days on end. He followed Liu Bei, who had recognized his talent, and set himself against Guan Yu, who despised him. Pride in his own ability seemed to run over in him. Perhaps, to the same degree that he thought highly of himself, he felt mistakes and slights with a painful keenness. That would be why he had gone over once Sun Quan came to him in person and acknowledged his gifts.
"Your judgment is not far wrong. I am still lacking. I have not set foot in the barracks since the battle of Nan Commandery because I came to see how short I fall."
"That is not so. To put it bluntly, I took you for someone like Lady Sun—a child who knows nothing of principle and acts as the mood takes her. But you have broken that prejudice of mine. You are the stuff of a gentleman."
Well. A harsh appraisal, no denying it. Lady Sun's level, of all things. Even I felt my pride bruise at that. Still, it was because he had seen me so that the guilt had brought him to my door. Thought of that way, it was not wholly a bad thing.
Pan Jun was an outstanding man. Probably. After he defected to Wu, Sun Quan was said to have treasured him, so the ability was real enough. I did not know precisely what work he had done, but even Liu Bei, whose eye for men was the finest under heaven, had acknowledged it. Ability like that was a note already guaranteed. And Shu, as things stood, was poorer in talent than Wei. I could not let a man like this slip away.
I rose at once and bent low at the waist, as deeply as he had bowed when he thanked me.
"I am grateful for praise beyond my due. But I know better than anyone that I am still lacking. So help me, Attendant. Lead me, as you said, until I can become a gentleman."
"M-my lady. Please raise your head."
"Will you hear me?"
"I already hold the office of Attendant of Jingzhou. I cannot remain at your side."
This was no longer the age of rival warlords. The days when men of talent went seeking a lord to serve, and ambitious heroes went seeking ministers to follow them, were past. Now, beyond that free-for-all and at the threshold of the three kingdoms standing abreast, Pan Jun was not about to throw away an attendant's post and trail after me. I knew it. I had no intention of asking anything so unreasonable.
"I am not asking you to come as a retainer of the Zhang house. It is enough if, whenever the thought comes, we exchange letters as friends of the brush."
People often misunderstand Confucianism as a teaching that prizes the order of old and young and reckons age with terrible strictness. Unexpectedly, in Confucianism age is truly nothing but a number. According to Mencius—which I came to know properly only after becoming Zhang Lan—one ought not to weigh years or station, but look to virtue and choose one's friends. Pan Jun was a Confucian of this age, before the teaching had been warped, and so he did not seize on age or rank or sex to object.
"Friends of the brush… a fine turn of phrase. But I fear whether I can be of any real help to you. Even without me, you will cultivate yourself. I fear my words might needlessly lead your will astray."
"Not so. I know how high your reputation stands. Speaking with you today, I have learned that the fame is not mistaken. You are certain to rise among the high ministers."
I had meant it as nothing but flattery, not knowing the future, but Pan Jun did in fact become Grand Master of Ceremonies in Wu. The high ministers—the Three Excellencies and the Nine Ministers named together—were the loftiest offices, the great lords of the realm. He gave his loyalty without reserve to those who recognized his talent, and under Guan Yu, who despised him, he changed his manner. He was a kind of Jean Lannes. Lannes, convinced his merits had gone unrecognized, had raged until he walked away from the army without leave. Was that so different from Pan Jun, who under a Guan Yu that slighted him failed in the duty of holding Jingzhou?
Sure enough, the moment I set his talent high, emotion washed over his face and he returned my bow. It was written all over him: I looked down on you, and you esteem me. His voice trembled.
"They say that when Liu of Yu Province went to seek out Military Advisor Zhuge, he called on him three times. How could I refuse any further? Pan Jun asks to be a friend of the brush to Zhang Lang."
Done!
I laughed outright and caught his hands in mine. Firm hands. The instinct came over me that a military post, and not only a civil one, would sit well on him.
If I built a friendship here, then the higher I rose, the harder Pan Jun would labor for Shu-Han—because the one who knew his worth would no longer be Liu Bei alone, but me as well. And once that bond was firm, if his trouble with Guan Yu looked past all control, it would be nothing strange to ask my father to pull him over to us.
There was profit on my side, too. Simply to keep company with a man of Pan Jun's renown would give me both standing and a name. The tale would run that Pan Jun, disciple of the great Confucian Song Zhong, had shared a friendship with Zhang Lan that leapt over age and sex—and that tale would serve, later, as an answer to the outcry once I entered the army. You know the classics better than Song Zhong, do you? Pan Jun studied under Song Zhong and still kept company with Zhang Lan. And who are you to call it a problem? That would become possible.
Building it up like this, one piece at a time, I sometimes felt a sudden regret: if only I had been born a man, nothing could have been better. Had I been Zhang Bao and not Zhang Lan, with a body as healthy and tough as Zhang Fei's, I would long since have won great merit at Red Cliffs or Nan Commandery and taken my place among the generals.
That there were advantages, too, in having been born Zhang Lan and not Zhang Bao—a woman, and not a man—was something I would come to see more clearly as time went on. That, though, was a story for later.
For now it was enough to be glad. I had taken one danger out of Jingzhou, and gained a man of talent who would stand on my side.
It was a certain day in the fifteenth year of Jian'an. The year 210.