The Luan Builds a Nest
Since arriving at Luocheng, I had taken care never to let myself drift far from Pang Tong. History changes. A world with an irregular like me caught in it would surely run in a direction other than the old current.
Even so, the unease would not leave me. The assignment Pang Tong had set me was the last thing on my mind. What kept rising instead were those other words—inertia, fate, cause and effect—all the claims that the future cannot be changed. Reason told me that could not be so, and still my heart went on stumbling out of rhythm.
Zhou Yu died too.
I had stood by and let his death happen, and yet Zhou Yu had died just as he did in the original history. How could I swear that Pang Tong would be any different?
But my fears proved almost laughable. The siege of Luocheng went forward without any great mishap.
A siege is like that from the start. Force against force. Even Zhuge Liang himself was stopped cold by Hao Zhao; in a siege, clever stratagems rarely find room to breathe. Unless a flood rises high enough to swallow the city whole, one siege looks much like another.
Still, even a contest of strength has its knack. In arm-wrestling, when the strength is equal, the same man keeps winning. A siege, too, has tactics of its own.
From the rear, Pang Tong surveyed the whole of the fighting with a calm that made me wonder how a stray arrow could ever have found him, and at every necessary moment he shifted troops to the precise place they were needed, pressing Luocheng as one living body. Luocheng, however, was no easy prey. Unlike the battles until now, its resistance carried the feel of men with nothing left behind them.
I heard that Liu Xun, Liu Zhang's eldest son, was commanding in person, and well he might. For the army of Yizhou, it was as good as having the crown prince among them. The city itself was a fortress granted by heaven: the Luo River flowed along its south, a tributary guarded the east, and a great host found it an awkward thing to attack.
In the end, Luocheng still stood after the year had turned. It was not simply that its soldiers had struggled hard enough to last so long. Through the siege the city had, if anything, hung by a thread. That it still clung to life was thanks to Zhang Ren, who raced the walls from end to end and appeared every time Pang Tong drove in like an awl.
"That man is the problem."
Pang Tong studied Zhang Ren a moment, then began to walk his horse slowly forward.
"Military Advisor! The front is dangerous!"
"And how am I to hope for results if I will not accept the danger? They have reached their limit. Show myself, and they will try to take me and end the battle, whatever it costs."
He would not stop for all my protests. Was this the moment? If he was closing in on purpose, baring a gap so the matter might be settled, then it was no longer strange that Pang Tong—a military advisor, not a general—should be struck by a stray arrow.
When he had drawn near enough that Luocheng could make him out, the city's east gate opened and a body of troops poured through.
"They're desperate too. They want me."
"Advisor!"
"Don't worry. I had General Huang waiting in advance. Settle Zhang Ren, that headache, this time, and taking Luocheng will be nothing but a matter of time."
Pang Tong had used himself as bait to lure Zhang Ren out.
Battle carries a brutal stress with it. There is a reason the word PTSD exists. A siege dragged on past the new year wears hard on the attackers, but for those holding the walls it must feel as if the blood is drying to dust in the veins. Generals may mean to fight on, yet the moment the soldiers reach their limit, it is finished. Zhang Ren understood that better than anyone. The instant he confirmed Pang Tong, he flung his whole body into the gamble without a heartbeat of hesitation.
Even that, in the end, was only a dance inside Pang Tong's hand. While he conducted the battle he had been watching, with meticulous care, how far the enemy's nerves had frayed and how near they stood to breaking.
Only after he saw Zhang Ren taken by Huang Zhong did Pang Tong turn his horse and ride back toward the rear. He had no notion of the strain on me, every nerve drawn tight against the chance an arrow was coming for him—and yet he read the enemy with uncanny precision.
At this rate the nervous collapse may take me before it takes them.
I was breathing out in relief, and grumbling under that relief, when—
…What?
An arrow entered my sight.
It ran straight and true for Pang Tong. At the point from which that shaft tore the air and seemed to be sucked toward him stood a youth in armor plainly unlike a common soldier's, glaring this way with eyes full of hate.
Time slowed. The arrow was slow; it seemed I might reach out and take it whenever I pleased. But the moment I lifted my arm, the arm moved as slowly as the arrow—no, slower still.
I can't catch it. Then can I block it?
Giving up an arm or so would not kill me. If I stopped the shaft in armor, then even if it punched through, it would not deal Pang Tong a mortal wound.
No. That won't work either. It's coming from the side opposite me.
In the end only one choice remained.
I seized Pang Tong and hauled him hard toward me, twisting my body as far as it would go to cover him, praying that luck would put the arrow in me and not in him.
Thud!
The sound of the arrow bursting flesh and burying itself rang strangely loud, even on a battlefield full of thunder.
But there was no pain. The arrow had struck Pang Tong, not me. I had wrenched aside too suddenly; balance broke, and I went off the horse with him caught in my arms. He was already shot. Let the injury of a fall pile onto that, and the wound would only grow worse.
I dropped beneath him so most of the impact came to me, and broke the fall. This body, blessed in its raw physicality, took the shock of leaving the saddle and still moved, whole.
Swallowing the heavy pain spreading through my back, I looked to Pang Tong before I looked to myself.
"Advisor! Advisor! Are you all right?"
My shout ran through the ranks, and soldiers rushed to throw up a shield-wall in front of us. While they guarded us from a further rain of arrows, Pang Tong slowly lifted the eyes he had shut.
"Yes… I'm all right. It took me in the shoulder."
"We have to get the Advisor to the rear!"
The arrow was lodged in Pang Tong's shoulder. Because I had yanked him aside, it had struck the shoulder and not the chest. This was no grave wound. Caught mid-turn as he was, it had not even gone deep.
Unless the arrow was poisoned, Pang Tong would not die. Ward off tetanus, and he would live. I could not ease my mind completely, but we had passed one crisis.
Leading him toward the rear, I spoke.
"Advisor, do you remember the assignment you gave me?"
"The assignment… I remember."
Why had he meant to raise Li Yan to high office? That had been the problem.
In truth there were many answers. Li Yan was a man of outstanding ability, and opening the gates of Mianzhu Pass to surrender had been his merit; he deserved treatment to match it. But that would not be the answer Pang Tong wanted.
So I had puzzled over it. Why ask something so obvious? Was I missing something? After we reached Luocheng I had thought of nothing but keeping him alive, and had forgotten the question had ever been put to me.
Then, seeing his face in the moment before the arrow struck, a thought had come to me—so absurd that even forming it felt ridiculous. What if he had already known that he was going to die?
And so I said it.
"I think I understand why you meant to employ Li Yan so heavily."
"I want to hear it."
"At first I took him for nothing more than a bridgehead between the Yizhou faction and the Jingzhou faction. But that is strange. Aside from Fei Guan, Li Yan has no one he could call a friend. He is not a man who can lead a faction."
"And so?"
"Next I wondered whether you meant to appoint men for ability rather than loyalty, use them, and then—once the realm had at last come to peace—demote them according to their conduct. But that is only a general rule. As the answer to a question you specifically left me for an assignment, it is far too thin."
Once that occurred to me, the next question was why Pang Tong, of all people, had asked it of me. Turning over the fact that he was the one who had set the problem, a hypothesis surfaced.
"Did you not regard Li Yan as your replacement?"
"…Astonishing."
"But there is a question here as well. Why think already of who would succeed you? Li Yan is not even older than you are."
The answer to that question was his expression itself.
"You knew you would die. Or at least you believed it. Grant that, and every part of the question resolves."
"Your reasoning is correct in full. Before we entered Shu, I was told that my star stood in peril, and that calamity would come of it."
They say Zhuge Liang saw a star fall and thereby knew of Pang Tong's death. But that was a tale from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
The Romance, turning up here of all places? Think one step further, though, and it was not a thing to dismiss as mere fiction. Was this not still an age that set great store by superstition and divination? An age in which physiognomy was honored as a proper field of learning, and foretelling the future upon Daoist principles was taken as a matter of course.
No—I myself was that superstition made flesh. Why had I been ignoring it? What right had I to scorn it as nothing but the limit of the age? I was a being born of the very things the sages would not speak of: prodigy, brute force, disorder, and spirits. To write it off as superstition was a contradiction of myself.
Soaked in pain, cold sweat running, Pang Tong went on.
"They spoke of my death. Of course I did not believe them. Kongming and I learned under Master Shuijing, and we rejected superstitions of that sort. But as you say, it seems a person has something one might call a feeling. When I heard it, I had a vague premonition that the ill-omened divination would come true. Preparing a successor was only a precaution against the one chance in ten thousand."
"Then why, knowing that, did you walk into the danger yourself?"
If you know, ought you not know enough to step aside? At the bluntness of it, Pang Tong smiled bitterly.
"Advisor Zhang, do you believe in the Mandate of Heaven?"
"I don't know."
"I do. I had my chances. I might have served under Liu Biao and contended for the realm with Jingzhou beneath me, or gone to Sun Quan and inherited Zhou Yu's design for dividing the empire in two. But I set my heart on serving my present lord, Governor Liu. Why do you suppose that was? Governor Liu in those days was not even strong beside Sun Quan."
"Because you believed the Mandate rested with our lord?"
The Han must endure.
He who rises as emperor must be a Liu.
Plenty of men still took those rigid, outworn laws for the Mandate of Heaven. Had Pang Tong been one of them? Before the disappointment could settle, he shook his head and denied it.
"Similar, but not the same. I judged that if there was to be a Mandate of Heaven, it ought to belong to Governor Liu. I meant to make him into that mandate."
The Mandate of Heaven. The destiny Heaven had sent down upon this land—Pang Tong said he had meant to shape it with his own hands.
"I held that the Mandate is not a thing one follows, but a thing one makes. And so if I died without taking Yizhou, then my great work of making our lord into Heaven's mandate would fail with me. That is why I cast myself into the trial."
"That is irresponsible. Isn't it abandoning an advisor's duty?"
"I admit it. But I believed it necessary. The great work we mean to accomplish requires fortune. Men make the Mandate of Heaven, but whether it comes to pass depends on Heaven's will."
Man proposes; Heaven disposes. The plotting of a thing is man's portion, but its fulfillment rests with the will of Heaven.
The mandate Pang Tong spoke of was fate—the charge Heaven lays upon a person. Yet however a human being strives, if fortune does not follow, the thing cannot be achieved, and so we call that Heaven's will. The sayings attributed to Zhuge Liang and the words Pang Tong spoke now held one and the same principle.
"I believe now that Heaven's will is with us. Is it not the same for you? The face that was tight with anxiety has grown easy."
My superior had taken an arrow, and my face had eased—words ripe for misunderstanding. But what he said was true. When I knew that he had been hit and still lived, I had felt something close to relief.
Before I could say anything more, Pang Tong let the eyelids he had been forcing open fall shut, and left his last words.
I set down the Pang Tong who had slipped into sleep. Watching the soldiers carry him off to the rear, I turned his words over and over.
The Mandate of Heaven, as Pang Tong meant it. If I had such a thing as well, what was mine? Was it my mandate, too, to have been born not Zhang Lan, the eldest daughter, but Zhang Lan?
Not the question of leaving a name in the histories, but of how I wished that name to be left. A vow to remain a general, and not an empress.
I lifted my head and looked up. The sky was clear. A deep blue hung there, perfectly at ease, as if nothing that happened on the ground were any concern of it—screams and war cries stabbing at the heavens, and the sky blue all the same.
What I wanted was to live as Zhang Lan.
But I had become Zhang Lan. A simple mistake? Or, as Pang Tong had said, had a mandate been laid upon me?
The mandate is not something you follow. It is something you make. Fulfill it, and let Heaven's will come after.
"Very well."
I picked up a spear left lying on the ground.
"Then I'll put myself to the test as well."
Spear in hand, I drove back against the current of retreating soldiers.
With Pang Tong, commander of the whole army, fallen from his horse, the men milled in confusion. I shouted to them.
"Brothers-in-arms—!"
A voice clear, and yet with iron in it, pressed down the clutter of noise afloat on the field and spread high into the sky.
"I am Zhang Lan, eldest daughter of Zhang Fei, General Who Subdues the Caitiffs—Acting Sima of the Army!"
Soldiers who heard me faltered in their steps, and then, one by one, they stopped moving. The attention gathering on me lifted me up. Yes. I wanted to be remembered. By the people of this age, and by the future that would come after it.
"The Advisor is unharmed! The enemy general who came out of the city has been taken, and the enemy are worn thin by a long siege! If we withdraw now, they will dress their ranks again, set their shaken discipline to rights, and raise their morale! Then no one can say when the fight against them will end! So we must fight! Turn about! Lift your spears and swords! Not a retreat—an advance! Not a rout—a victory!"
Our army had not yet fully withdrawn. Drive in now, and we could bring down a city whose Zhang Ren had been captured and whose strength had a hole torn in it. My instinct was shouting as much.
I ran for the walls ahead of anyone else.
And before a single voice could call me back, I kicked up a shield lying on the ground, caught it, set my foot to a ladder, and roared.
"Attack! Before I was Acting Sima of the Army, I fought as one soldier! And I am one still!"
The ebb turned, and ran in again as a flood.
It was the moment the tide of the battlefield reversed.