Preparing to Take Flight
Liu Xun felt the elation that had filled his chest drain out of him with terrible speed.
Up through the moment his arrow struck Pang Tong and pitched him from the saddle, Liu Xun had been awash in relief at having weathered the crisis, and swollen with the satisfaction of having killed one of Liu Bei's closest men. Liu Bei's army, leaderless and scrambling backward in a rout—how delightful a sight that had been. To picture that insufferable Liu Bei grieving the loss of an officer he cherished, and failing besides to take Chengdu, was like a lifelong congestion in the chest finally clearing.
True, Liu Xun had lost a general of his own in Zhang Ren. But Zhang Ren set against Pang Tong—anyone could see which side had come out ahead. Had Zhang Ren not led his soldiers out, they might have sallied beyond the walls and enlarged the victory, and it galled him that they could not. Then again, without Zhang Ren the shot that brought Pang Tong down would have been impossible.
The joy did not last.
There had been a nameless officer at Pang Tong's side. No—by his own account, Sima of the Marching Host, Zhang Lan. Liu Xun had not even known such a person existed in Liu Bei's camp. The name rang faintly familiar, but in the end she was only a woman. How much strength could she possibly show on a battlefield? With their commander fallen and the ranks in chaos, Liu Bei's army had already lost the will to fight.
Or so he believed. At first, following the girl-general who took the lead and mounted the scaling ladder, no more than two or three squads—each a mere five men—turned about. Then more wheeled in their wake, and the turn spread like the ripples a single drop casts across water: from squads to platoons, from platoons to companies, from companies to battalions, and at last through the entire host. With Zhang Lan at their head, Liu Bei's army hurled itself once more at Luo Castle, and its momentum utterly overwhelmed a garrison gone slack with relief.
"Ha... ha..."
Hatred and rancor alike dissolved into emptiness. Liu Xun did not know how he was meant to take this. Not the famed scholar called the Fledgling Phoenix. Not Liu Bei himself, the enemy's chief and a veteran of a hundred battles. One young girl's desperate fight alone had brought Luo Castle to the very brink of falling. It was simply absurd.
"But I cannot go alone."
Zhang Lan swept aside the soldiers frozen in shock along the rampart and carved out space, and the men of Liu Bei's army who came up behind her used her as their foothold and seized the wall in short order.
Luo Castle was finished.
However fiercely Liu Xun fought, a tide this far gone could no more be turned than spilled water gathered back into the cup. He knew it, and still he fought, cutting down Liu Bei's soldiers one by one as he drove toward where Zhang Lan stood. She was doing the same. From the first, Liu Xun had been the one she wanted.
Each ordered their own men—those blocking the path between them—to open a way.
"I'll take you with me, if no one else."
Wringing out the last of his rage, Liu Xun looked into Zhang Lan's face, and the strength fled his grip so suddenly he nearly dropped his sword.
A young lady like this... how could she...
The Zhang Lan he had been watching was a rakshasi. One stroke of the blade cut a soldier down; she killed whatever enemy came to hand as a wolf massacres a flock, a ferocity Liu Xun himself was not certain he could overcome. Yet the Zhang Lan standing before him was a girl whose face refused, utterly, to match that slaughter. Had he met her not on the ramparts of Luo Castle but in the marketplace of Chengdu...
"Useless thoughts."
He bit his tongue on purpose and shocked his mind awake.
Zhang Lan waited until he had gathered himself and raised his sword properly. Only then did she thrust.
Clang—!
"Ngh—!"
He barely turned the spear that shot out like an arrow, but the shock climbing through the blade set his arms buzzing. Astonishingly, Zhang Lan—a girl of only fourteen—far outstripped him in strength. When he parried and let the thrust slide off, she kept the spear locked against his sword and wound it around.
Fatigue had piled up through the long fight, and Zhang Lan's opening clash had already left his arms numb. They could not hold. Following the spin of her spear, the sword tore free of his hands and dropped beyond the wall. He lunged for another blade or spear lying on the stones, but her follow-up was faster and slammed across his body.
Crack!
"Khah—!"
Struck through the torso with the spear shaft, Liu Xun emptied every breath from his lungs, collapsed onto the stones hacking and wheezing, and curled in on himself. It was not playacting, nor some craven bid to live. His body had simply folded of its own accord.
"Take him alive. Do not let him die. Then we go down into the city as we are, open the gates, and receive our own."
The soldiers' eyes, fixed on the Zhang Lan who had broken Liu Xun in only three blows, were steeped in awe. Having proved herself by a martial feat that stunned them, her orders now carried authority. The men did as she said and opened the gates of Luo Castle, and the army waiting outside poured in like a burst dike.
From the far side, Pang Tong—only just able to open his eyes—watched with perfect clarity the moment those gates swung wide.
The luan does not appear in an age of great peace. Only when the world is troubled and turbid does the luan display its blue plumage and cry, beautiful and full of sorrow. And when the luan appears, only then does the world find peace once more.
Pang Tong could see them: blue wings budding from the back of the girl who stood upon the wall and gave commands to the world, azure plumage that held the vault of heaven.
Become the luan. The luan that will burn this age of chaos to ash.
That day, Liu Bei's army took Luo Castle.
It was the spring of the year 214.
Liu Bei, who had left command of the fighting at Luo Castle to Pang Tong and watched the battle from afar, sank into a regret he had not felt in a very long time. He should have taken the field himself, even if it meant losing more soldiers. When word first came that Pang Tong had been struck by an arrow and thrown from his horse—and when, as if to prove the news true, he saw the men falling back—Liu Bei railed at the cruelty of Heaven. What a man he had won, and at what cost. What an opportunity.
The Sleeping Dragon and the Fledgling Phoenix were his mind. If Guan Yu and Zhang Fei were the two arms with which he struck his enemies, then Zhuge Liang and Pang Tong were the men who, through governance and the art of war, laid the road before him. Because of them he had endured every trial until now and risen again at the last; because he had gained them, he had made the footing for his great work. Standing on that narrow footing, he had at last built a power that embraced both Jing and Yi, and set his feet at the start of the grand design Zhuge Liang had conceived for the unification of the realm—the Longzhong Plan.
Not the Longzhong Plan alone. Liu Bei had a design of his own as well. He would charge Zhuge Liang, his own Zhang Zifang, with the whole of the state's affairs, while Pang Tong supplied the practical means—grand strategy and military craft—by which Zhuge Liang's vision would be drawn upon the world. Along the frame the two of them built, he himself would lead loyal and peerless captains, his brothers and Zhao Yun, Huang Zhong and Wei Yan, and contend for all under heaven.
Even without Pang Tong, there were men who might fill the empty seat. There was Fa Zheng, whose ability Pang Tong himself had acknowledged as nearly the equal of his own, and Li Yan, who had surrendered in this campaign, was no less than they. But in the great design Liu Bei envisioned, no talent fit so well as Pang Tong. Wise, and yet bold and open-hearted, he was on easy terms with both Guan Yu and Zhang Fei, and—having studied beneath the same roof as Zhuge Liang—he alone could be the Sleeping Dragon's truest kindred mind. The one man who could keep close company with every principal figure of Liu Bei's power, and draw their cooperation to its height, was Pang Tong, and no one else.
Shiyuan...
That Liu Bei, posted at the very rear, had come all the way to where the battle for Luo Castle raged was proof enough of how dearly he prized him. He had come to meet in person the Pang Tong said to have taken an arrow, and, should the wound prove past remedy, to keep vigil at his death. And so he had been able to see it: the back of a girl advancing alone while every other face turned away, and the march of the soldiers she led into the counterattack. In the moment she climbed the wall without hesitation, displayed a valor worth a thousand men, and flung open the gates of Luo Castle, word reached him that Pang Tong was safe—and, in careful detail, that he lived only because Zhang Lan had shielded him in her arms.
O Heaven. Have you at last consented to know the dream of this Liu Xuande?
He had always worn a smile. Someone had to. Even when he lost his ground and was driven out, even when his following scattered to nothing and he lived a shabby life beneath another man's heel, Liu Bei himself had to smile, and seem at ease. Even if his heart was rotting within him and he wept blood, a commander had to trust in his mandate and stand unbent. How long those days had been, fretting as he watched Cao Cao rise like the morning sun. How many times men of talent had left him, and the hour had looked past all hope.
But now, at last, Liu Bei felt that a light was falling upon him as well. Since Red Cliffs he had known no defeat. He had driven off Cao Ren and taken Nanjun; he had swept the south of Jingzhou. And now Yizhou, too, was all but closed inside his grasp.
"Yide—was it you who bore a luan for me? For this foolish elder brother's sake?"
Gazing at the girl who had saved Pang Tong, set a collapsing army to rights, and taken Luo Castle, Liu Bei cast a very old past across her. Long ago, when the three brothers stood together against the Yellow Turbans, Zhang Fei had been just so. With a courage to match ten thousand, a valor ten thousand men could not withstand, he had swept the Yellow Turbans aside—exactly as Zhang Lan did now. How much time had passed. Already he was watching the children of those three brothers win renown of their own, and as he did, Liu Bei called up the faces of the brothers he missed.
"You are his very image, Yide."
He went toward Pang Tong with a light step, and he smiled—not a false mask, but a bright, contented smile that held his true heart.