The Luan Builds Its Nest
In the year 212, Yizhou lay thick with the brewing conflict between two men of the Liu clan—Liu Zhang and Liu Bei. Nearly a year had passed since Liu Bei entered the province and settled himself at Jiameng Pass. Brought in to subdue Zhang Lu, and even furnished with troops of his own, he had put the attack off day after day, soothing the people of the surrounding lands and drawing them into his own sphere. Liu Zhang had begun to suspect him.
The rift between them had not yet broken the surface. Given a single spark, though, their uneasy sharing of a roof would shatter in an instant. Fortunately, when I arrived in Yizhou, some loose thread of cooperation still held. The province's officials, moreover, took the head of this courier mission for an obscure staff officer of no particular fame. They had no special reason to bar the way.
The road was rough, but we reached Jiameng Pass without any real trouble. Once we arrived, the military air of the place was honed to a razor's edge, as if the army might pour out and strike somewhere at any moment. To say merely that elite troops had gathered there did not begin to explain it. They were facing Zhang Lu, yes—but that was a show, and nothing more.
"Miss, the mood here is awfully grim, isn't it?"
"Yeah. Feels like they're about to fight a battle."
So the war with Liu Zhang was quietly coming due. I couldn't say exactly when Liu Bei's conquest of Yizhou was meant to begin, but it was a thing that had to happen. Even if it started this very day, it would be no great shock.
"Let's go."
We followed our guide to the tents and took a short rest while the soldiers reported to Liu Bei that a courier had arrived. It wasn't urgent news, where every moment counted, and we had come a long way; I thought we might rest a day, set our dress in order, and only then be received. The thought had barely formed before a summons came, almost the instant we set our packs down.
"Things must be moving fast."
"And yet you seem perfectly calm, miss."
"I expected it. Anyway, rest with the others while I'm gone."
Every soldier who had fought beside me had come along on this mission. They were precious subordinates who had sworn to follow me to the end before I ever mentioned that further rewards might be waiting. If I didn't look after them, who would?
I brushed the dust from my clothes, splashed my face, and had to go at once. By all rights that much should have left me looking a mess, but this body of mine turned even that into something like vintage fashion. Is this another Mountain Spirit buff, or what? My hair had grown quite long, and I hadn't been able to tend it properly on the road into Shu, yet not a single end was split—it hung perfectly smooth. I did wash it, but in an age without shampoo, how did that make any sense? Youth might explain the skin. Even so, this body was in absurdly fine condition.
It was smaller than the official residence at Gong'an, but Jiameng Pass had a building one could still call a government hall. While I waited outside the council chamber for leave to enter, voices drifted faintly past the door. An attendant announced that I had come.
"Let her in."
Everyone inside fell silent at once. Only my footsteps broke the stillness as I entered, and in the center of the chamber I bowed my head toward Liu Bei.
"Your servant Zhang Lan greets her lord."
"Lan? How you've grown. You've grown up so well."
I had grown, no denying that. At a full hundred and fifty centimeters, by the measure of this age I was hardly different from a grown man. Liu Bei sprang up from where he sat and came to me. He raised me from the bow and looked me over with a worried face, turning this way and that to see whether I had been hurt.
"I wasn't injured, so please don't worry."
"Ho ho—so it seems. But why did you come yourself? You might have sent someone else."
"I asked the military advisor for the task."
"Kongming?"
I laid out, piece by piece, what had happened in Jingzhou. How Lady Sun had seized on the slack left by the march into Shu and tried to take Liu Shan back with her. How I had foreseen it and blocked the road, and how Zhao Yun, coming in pursuit, and I had brought Liu Shan safely out. And last, the settling of matters afterward—how I myself had stepped forward to deliver the report.
Liu Bei listened without a word, and even at the news that his son had nearly been carried off he was astonishingly calm. A cold clarity so unlike the man who had just been fretting over me that I found it strange.
"I see. So that's how it was. Sun Quan… Hmm. Military Advisor."
"Yes, my lord."
Murmuring to himself, Liu Bei returned to the seat of honor and called out, and the man at his immediate right took a step forward. Solidly built, of middling height—he was the very reason I had come all this way to the distant, rugged land of Shu. Pang Tong. A genius of tragic fate, better known by the name Fledgling Phoenix than by his courtesy name, Shiyuan.
This was the first time I had seen him with my own eyes. The Romance called him an ugly man, but he did not strike me as so ill-favored as I had expected. Set him beside the incomparably handsome Zhuge Liang and he would look ugly, of course—but that was the same principle by which anyone standing next to a peerless beauty turns into a squid. Pang Tong's features gave a dull impression, yet his eyes alone were keen and clear. His looks might fall a little short of average, but there was an air about him that said he was anything but ordinary. Something of the civil official, and something of the officer of war—a strangely uncanny sort of man.
To that Pang Tong, Liu Bei spoke.
"Sun Quan asks our aid, and at the same time tries to stir disorder within our ranks. What are we to do?"
Sun Quan had asked for help? That was the first I'd heard of it. I had thought I was keeping some watch on the news around me—or had something happened on the road from Jingzhou to Yizhou? Even so, by distance I ought to have arrived first. If the word had come by the Yangtze, though, it might just be possible. Whatever the case, it was true I had been so fixed on entering Shu that I had let outside affairs slip. Reflect. Come on—reflect.
"Sun Quan will already know the matter has gone awry, so there is no need to send him aid. We should seize the opening while Sun Quan and Cao Cao contend with each other, and take Yizhou."
"And what does Xiaozhi think?"
Xiaozhi was Fa Zheng's courtesy name. He stood about Liu Bei's height, with a thoroughly cantankerous look about him. Setting aside the foul temperament that seemed to prove a reading of his face, in ability he was truly without peer. Sleeping Dragon and Fledgling Phoenix were hailed as the finest minds of Liu Bei's faction, but when it came to war, I rather thought Fa Zheng was the greatest on Liu Bei's side. Pang Tong died too soon to judge with any ease, but if one went only by what the histories left behind, that was how it stood.
A strategist worthy to stand beside Pang Tong, Fa Zheng offered the same opinion.
"I share the view of the Military Advisor General of the Household. Liu Zhang is an indecisive man. He will not bring himself to a decision at once, and will waver. Have Zhang Song answer us from within, rise like a thunderbolt, and drive upon Chengdu, and Yizhou will of itself become my lord's."
And this was Fa Zheng—a man who had once been Liu Zhang's vassal—calling Liu Bei his lord without the slightest hitch. When the two strategists who now served as Liu Bei's left brain and right brain counseled him with one voice, Liu Bei gave a heavy nod.
"I asked for aid to hold Cao Cao in Jingzhou, yet Governor Liu did not send even half of it. Liu Zhang was the first to cast righteousness aside. How am I to sit still?"
Liu Bei's voice had gone bleak.
It was the declaration of the war to take Yizhou.
The council ended there. Liu Bei ordered his commanders to keep the soldiers well in hand, then had Pang Tong, Fa Zheng, and me remain behind. When the chamber had emptied, he at last took up the matter of rewarding my merit.
"Come to think of it, you said Kongming reckoned your deed a military merit and asked me what reward I meant to give."
"Yes, my lord."
"My lord? There's no need to stand on such ceremony anymore. Call me Uncle, and be at ease. But this merit—what reward ought I give? Is there something you want?"
This is the chance. Now that Liu Bei had declared the taking of Yizhou, the moment was right.
"I wish to enter the army."
"Hm?"
"I don't need an office. Please let me become a soldier, and attend my lord."
Liu Bei looked troubled. It was not the ready permission he had given when I was younger. Of course then and now were very different. In the past my guardian, Zhang Fei, had been there; here, he was not. And that had been a time when he had not even secured southern Jingzhou. Now Liu Bei was taking his run-up, about to rise as a warlord spanning two provinces. At a juncture this grave, he would want to avoid anything that might set tongues wagging.
But he had acknowledged the merit and asked what I wanted himself. A refusal would hardly make a fine picture either, and so he hesitated. Reading his lord's heart, Pang Tong asked in his place.
"How old are you this year, Young Lady Zhang?"
"Twelve."
"Far too young to enter the army."
"At nine I followed my father into the fighting at Nanjun. I killed the horse of Yu Jin, Cao Ren's lieutenant, and threw him from the saddle. As I am now, I can fully do one person's share."
"That is a common man's courage."
Pifu zhi yong—the valor of an ordinary brave. An old saying from Mencius. People usually reached for it when describing Xiang Yu, but it was not reserved for him alone: a slight against any shock-troop captain who could fight and nothing more, with not a scrap of strategy in him. At any rate, having dismissed my little self-promotion as mere brute courage, Pang Tong put his question exactly like a man conducting an interview.
"You must have seen something of Yizhou on the road to Jiameng Pass. If it were you, young lady, how would you scheme to take it?"
"There is a best plan, and a worst."