The First Flight
Summer of the nineteenth year of Jian'an, the year 214. Zhang Lan urged Liu Bei to rescue Ma Chao's household, and after long deliberation Liu Bei consented. He then appointed Zhang Lan Lieutenant General and set Zhao Yun, Chen Dao, and Wei Yan at her side, every one of them a fierce commander counted among the finest under heaven. When Pang De joined them and they broke free of Zhang Lu, the age praised the company as the Five Generals Who Pierced the Pass.
Hooves hammered the earth.
They were few. A dozen mounts at most, and one of those drew a carriage, so true cavalry did not even number nine. Yet anyone who later came to know their faces would have gone cold at the sight.
Zhao Yun, the tiger of Changshan. Chen Dao, commander of the White Plume Guard. Wei Yan, someday to be Grand General Who Conquers the West. Pang De, the White Horse General. And I, Zhang Lan.
The five of us, with scarcely ten soldiers besides, rode escort to Ma Chao's wife and children.
"The pursuit is close!"
It was Pang De who shouted. Whatever one might say of the martial fame in this company, none of them matched him in the saddle, and he had taken the rearmost place upon himself, measuring the gap between us and the hunters.
"I'll cut them once!"
Wei Yan, pressed alongside the carriage, cried it with fierce delight and wrenched his horse about. Several soldiers followed. He swung a wide arc, reversed, and—like a man who had never learned the meaning of fear—drove straight into a pursuit of several thousand.
"Waaaaah!"
"Kill them!"
"There's only three or four of them!"
From the rear came the enemy's roar and the clash of arms, already thinning as they fell away.
"Is it wise to leave him out there?"
"Don't worry. Colonel Wei is a fierce general our lord himself treasures."
Zhao Yun's answer to Pang De was no empty comfort. The proof came at once. Wei Yan returned to the column sheathed in blood.
"Damn it! We lost one!"
"Mm..."
A single soldier dead. Where under heaven is a life not precious? The man who had followed Wei Yan was elite cavalry Wei Yan had raised with his own hands, no different from a disciple. Watching him spit out his grief, Pang De seized the iron halberd slung across his back.
"We'll go collect the blood-price. Lads—show them what Liang cavalry can do!"
The Liang riders who followed Pang De numbered only two, yet they turned their horses without a heartbeat of hesitation, wheeling far more cleanly than Wei Yan had. The moment the three were swallowed by the pursuit, sprays of blood leapt and dyed the blue sky red.
Pang De's fight was a slaughter, plain and simple. Wei Yan's charge with the Jing cavalry had been a wonder in its own right, but Pang De unleashed a ferocity of a higher order still.
He came back with the white coat of his prized horse soaked crimson, and both Liang riders still at his side.
"Will that serve as blood-price?"
Seeing that not one of them had died, Wei Yan clicked his tongue, short and sharp. Of course he was measuring himself against the other man. It must have rankled, to feel his own household had come off the worse. And when the pursuit closed the gap again, it was Chen Dao who seized the initiative before Pang De could so much as move.
Chen Dao, so taciturn that the times he had opened his mouth since they set out could be counted on one hand, spoke.
"Colonel Wei. We go again."
"Together, then?"
"Yes."
Chen Dao and Wei Yan, a twin-headed engine of slaughter, tore through the pursuit.
Even with the carriage dragging at their speed, they had not yet been caught, and the two of them showed why without a veil. Chen Dao, called a fierce general scarcely second to Zhao Yun, was no empty name.
Unlike Wei Yan, who had not yet come into his fullness, Chen Dao had already reached a ripe mastery. He knew to the instant when to strike and when to slip away, and he checked the pursuit again and again.
"I never knew Inspector Liu of Yu kept so many fierce generals under him."
"Didn't I say? These country boys can actually ride."
"Mind your tongue."
At Pang De's warning the foul-mouthed Liang rider sucked in a sharp breath. Pang De was frightening. There was no denying that.
And yet it truly didn't feel as if we were going to lose.
Turn the whole column and fight them in the open, and we might even win. No one would do anything so mad while Ma Chao's wife and children were under our guard. Still—if we did fight, wouldn't we win?
"General Zhao."
"I am against it."
"You don't even know what I was going to say."
"I don't need to. You mean to throw yourself in, same as the rest of them."
"Doesn't a general's blood run hot?"
"Our lord's command comes before that. I am bound to keep you alive."
"Then come with me."
I'm sorry. Even so, I have to go. This plan was mine. All of this happened because I said we should.
The soldiers are hurling themselves in with no care for death. I can't sit in the safe place as if I were one of the people we're escorting.
This was a duty I had to carry. A responsibility.
"This time, I'll go!"
"We'll follow!"
"Lan, you stubborn creature. Master Chen, the carriage is yours. Hya!"
I took the van, with Wei Yan and Zhao Yun to either side of me.
Zhao Yun on the left, Wei Yan on the right. How many people alive had ever been granted a luxury like that? Liu Bei, perhaps, and Zhuge Liang, and that was all. And even they had never truly set their horses abreast and charged an enemy line the way I was about to.
"Hahaha!"
I was glad. This moment was a joy. I knew perfectly well that what I meant to do was the hideous work of killing men, and still the thrill of standing in the middle of a moment that would become history nearly brought me to tears.
Not yet.
I can drink this rapture to the lees after everything is finished. It won't be too late.
For now I look only at the enemy before my eyes.
Puhwak!
A red line of blood was drawn along the path the spear had taken.
"Stop them!"
Shhk!
Whatever rose to bar the way was cut down.
"Khuk—what kind of strength..."
Thuk!
It hardly deserved to be called a battle anymore. Where the three of us passed, there was only a road of corpses and blood, drawn out long behind us. The horses' legs did not know how to stop, and our spears went on harvesting lives.
Strength overflowed. Was it the drug the brain would not stop pouring out? A body that could not feel fatigue. And it seemed I was not the only one. Zhao Yun. Wei Yan.
Have you ever watched a giant hornet fight honeybees? The bees can kill the hornet. But to bring down a single one, thousands of them die. One against a thousand, in the truest sense. A great slaughter.
Our fight against the pursuit was close to that. Unlike bees, which know no fear as a swarm and cling to the hornet in suicide attacks, human beings are creatures of feeling. They know terror.
Even the severity of an order fades before the fear of death. They deserved praise merely for having chased us this far.
Each time the successive charges of Wei Yan, Pang De, Chen Dao, and Zhao Yun crashed over them, more than a hundred soldiers died, and still they had held. Was it because the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice had bound them into one faith? Even that had reached its limit.
Dudududu! Thud! Chwaak!
A blow driven in like a wedge against an enemy already losing the will to fight. Pang De's arrival. The line we had already churned heaved again.
The soldiers who had been trying, somehow, to dress their ranks and shove us back lost their order in a single moment.
"Take their commander!"
I had picked out the enemy general on the far side, and I shouted. The instant the three fierce generals heard and closed on me, the finest assault force then living under heaven cut straight across the enemy line.
The miracle Zhao Yun had wrought at Changban. The legend Pang De would write as the White Horse General. The great merit Wei Yan would one day carve from the northern campaigns.
Here, again—or here, ahead of their time—those things were happening.
"M-monsters..."
The enemy general who met my eyes shook so hard his jaw rattled, and he retched the word out in a clumsy slur. It was his last.
Shhk!
My spear sheared the neck of a commander who could not even raise a hand against it. His head fell with the collapsing body and struck the ground. Wei Yan speared that head as it rolled across the blood-soaked earth, thrust the spear high, and roared.
The soldiers had already lost their fighting spirit. Now they had not even a commander left to drive them on, and they stopped in a daze, the strength running out of the arms that held their weapons.
Unlike the charge that had gone in at full speed, we came back at our ease along a road made of the enemy's dead.
Pang De looked at the head Wei Yan had kept apart and spoke.
"Yang Ren."
"The enemy general's name?"
"In Zhang Lu's camp he counted among the strongest. And even so, it seems he wasn't worth a single exchange against that heroine. If the daughter is like this, what kind of monster is Zhang Fei?"
"Ma Chao wouldn't be a match for the General Who Subdues the Caitiffs either."
"Hmph. That's not a thing one can know."
Even as he said it, Pang De could not bring himself to declare, outright, that Ma Chao was the stronger.
Chen Dao looked at the lot of us returning, every one dyed in blood from head to foot, and spoke with a regret that was not like him at all.
"I should have gone with you."
"Aren't you already a comrade who has shared all of it?"
"Hah. Is that so."
He laughed. Well. I've never seen Chen Dao laugh before.
"Am I the same?"
Pang De drew his horse alongside and asked, and Zhao Yun nodded.
"Of course. We are men who have staked our lives together. How could I leave Master Pang De out?"
"An honor."
Fifteen of them had broken a pursuit of thousands. And not once, but again and again, riding into the very heart of it to hold the enemy back.
They all knew. This escape would remain in history. Their martial names would be told across thousands of years.
But unlike the others, Wei Yan could not easily join the ranks of joy. I could guess why. Every soldier who had come with us this time was one Wei Yan himself had raised.
"Three of them died. On our side."
"Yes."
"We'll be remembered, won't we. But who is going to remember them?"
A side of Wei Yan I had thought of only as a man whose character was a wreck. Who would have known that Wei Yan—sour with every superior and every comrade save Liu Bei—could cherish his own men like this?
"I was only lamenting. A great merit like this ought to be celebrated. Forget I said it."
"I won't forget."
"What?"
"Hyeongyo. Baekjin. Gomaeng."
"Their names..."
"It's enough if we remember."
I remembered the name of everyone who had been with me, even for a moment. History might forget them. I would not.
Just as I hoped to live on inside someone's memory, so would they. Because I wanted to remain in someone's memory, I would remember others in my turn.
"...Yes."
On the road back, the wind rose. Hard, as if it meant to blow the reek of blood away. And yet soft, as if it meant to soothe worn travelers.
The cloak I had put on for this mission billowed on that wind.
Each time it snapped, the stains on the lining showed. No—not stains. They were letters. Names. The traces of the dead, written in blood.
I had wanted someone to know that these were not deaths excused away as honorable, but deaths that someone would remember. And so I returned to Yi Province.
Ma Chao came out as far as Wudu to meet us. Not long after we returned with him, white flags were hung over Chengdu.
At last, the moment Liu Bei became master of Yi Province.