I Am the Daughter of Zhang Yide
Human beings are a curious thing.
You can be certain you have wrung every last ounce of strength from your body — and you will have done exactly that — and still the mind finds some fresh reserve and sets the limbs moving again.
How much vitality a person can draw from beauty, a thing that does nothing at all to ease fatigue, secure nourishment, or restore muscle.
That a human being can sometimes take strength simply by looking upon something beautiful — the men gathered here were coming to understand it more clearly than anyone.
In the middle of a run, exhaustion usually leaves no room to spare a glance at one's surroundings. Yet not one of these soldiers could help rolling his eyes now and again, busy stealing looks at a single spot.
The place where their gazes converged. The girl jogging alongside them was a stark anomaly in a barracks seething with nothing but the sweat of men.
Hair cropped short, breath held steady, feet working hard — she seemed, by her presence alone, to lend the soldiers strength. If even a little thing like that could manage it, why shouldn't he? That spark of rivalry, and the wish to stay beside her and keep watching without falling behind, drove them on from behind.
Zhang San, lucky enough to be running right at the girl's side, remembered. When she first came here, Zhang Fei, who led them, had declared before the rank and file in that booming voice:
With so stern a word from Zhang Fei, what soldier would dare ignore it? And she was only a girl of nine. Her hair was cut short; she must have done something wrong and been thrown into training to have the mischief beaten out of her. Pay her no mind, they thought, and Zhang Fei would pull her out in due course.
Even so, a feast for the eyes was no bad thing, and behind Zhang Fei's back they had tittered over the girl's looks, saying that in time she would grow into a remarkable beauty.
But a day became two, and two became a week. Zhang San and the soldiers with him understood.
This girl was serious.
"Huff... huff..."
Zhang San was not especially strong of body. Below average, if anything. Trying to keep properly to Zhang Fei's vicious, grinding run, he was bound to flag.
Little by little he began to fall behind. The hyena-like pack that had been waiting for his place to empty closed the distance by degrees. Just as Zhang San, swallowing his tears, was about to drop back, a voice from beside him slipped cleanly into his ear.
"Are you all right? Just a little more. It'll be over soon."
A clear young voice, cut from different cloth than the rough voices of soldiers. Hearing that bright tone, hardly disordered even in the middle of a run, Zhang San felt strength rise in him from somewhere he himself could not name.
He widened the stride that had been shrinking and drove his feet down hard.
When the run was finished I steadied my ragged breathing and loosened my muscles with a cooldown stretch. I could feel eyes gathering as I stretched and folded myself this way and that, but I was used to it by now.
I let the stares slide past and went on with what I had to do, until someone came up beside me. When I first entered the camp Zhang Fei had laid down a warning, so everyone had only watched me from the corners of their eyes — who on earth was this? I turned my head and found a familiar man's face, the one who had been running beside me a moment ago.
"Um... that is..."
He had started, and then, as expected from my awkward standing, he stammered. Thinking to myself that I still had a long way to go, I said:
"What is it?"
Between the habits of my past life and a manner of speech I kept deliberately masculine, the man seemed to loosen rather than tighten. The hesitation in him shrank until it was plain to see. Odd, when it ought to have sounded stiff.
He drew a deep breath, like a boy in the thick of adolescence working up to a confession, then bent low at the waist before me.
"Thank you. Thanks to you, young lady, I was able to run it through to the end. I feel as if... I learned something new."
What? What did I do?
All I said was that there wasn't much left, so hang on a little longer. Wasn't that all?
The suspicion that he was only dressing up his words for an excuse to talk to me vanished the moment I saw the face he raised. It was full of sincerity. Even to me, accustomed to modern method acting, it did not look like a performance.
People do sometimes take a great feeling from a trifle. That must be it. And the timing was good. I had already been thinking I was drifting too far outside the group; if I used this opening, perhaps I could melt in a little.
Unlike Zhang Fei, severe past the point of harshness, I shared their toil. If Zhang Fei was the distant, frightening father, I would be the near and familiar elder sister. The stick and the carrot. Good cop and bad cop.
"Not at all. I only put a word in. Running all the way to the end was—"
"Zhang San. And please, speak more plainly to me."
"Speak plainly? As the general ordered before, I don't want any special treatment. I think of us as comrades in the same ranks."
I wasn't sure a raw recruit like me, who had never once set foot on a battlefield, had any right to say such a thing, but Zhang San looked deeply moved.
I rolled my eyes around at the others. Far from resistance, the faces there — greater and lesser differences aside — were steeped in the same feeling as Zhang San's.
She was the daughter of a Zhang Fei that harsh; their expectations must have been low from the start. Zhang Fei had never broken his habits even when Liu Bei tried to stop him, so what could one expect of the daughter? They must have thought so. And yet the sight of me showing courtesy even to common soldiers seemed to strike them as a fresh shock.
"How could... ignorant rustics like us be the same as a young lady..."
"We are the same."
I mean that. To me, who had lived in the egalitarian society of the twenty-first century, a system of rank was still a strange thing. Of course the modern world had its open classes too, and in this age of chaos the worth of each person truly ran to every extreme — but at least right now, we were equal.
We wore the same clothes, took the same training, and ate the same meals. Of course I would climb faster than they, and with a high chance of high office, but that was a matter for the future. And even that was not yet settled, was it?
"Th-the general did say as much, but..."
"The general is strict, but he is just as strict with himself. If he said it, then he meant it, so don't fret over it."
I called him general, not father, drawing a line between public and private. They already called me young lady; if I stressed that Zhang Fei and I were father and daughter, they would only feel the difference more keenly.
People commonly think of Zhang Fei as passionate and emotional, but that is the man of the Romance. The Zhang Fei of the histories was remarkably disciplined in governing himself. A man who aspired to be a gentleman was not one to say one thing and mean another.
"Even so, don't hate the general too much. It isn't that he dislikes his officers and men. He expects that much of them, and that's why. You felt it too, didn't you, Zhang San? As if you'd taken a step forward. That's what this is. He drives you because he wants you to grow further."
At my words Zhang San stood with his mouth hanging open, nodding blankly. Had that been too grown-up a speech for a nine-year-old? If I acted at least somewhat my age, the people around me would accept me more easily.
Still, geniuses like Zhou Yu and Zhuge Ke had left their traces in the histories from around my age, so there was no need to worry too much, was there?
Contrary to my worry, the soldiers around me seemed to find my words admirable, and they praised me up as a filial daughter. The line between me and the soldiers had certainly been drawn hard — to put it a little unkindly, I had been something like a sight in a zoo cage. But now the air felt changed, however faintly, into that of comrades enduring the same hardship.
It was not only my sense of it. The soldiers drew a little closer, and unlike before they even spoke to me, here and there.
Good. Grow familiar like this, one by one, and a personal guard that followed only me would take shape as well — while I worked on Zhang Fei's favor besides.
Does Zhang Fei know? That I'm trying this hard for his sake?
Of late Zhang Fei's face was full of a pleased color. He was not a man who let his expression show often, so only a few could read the shifts in his feeling — but now his pleasure was plain enough for anyone to see.
Those few could even tell how deeply he rejoiced, and they would ask again in surprise. Just as now.
"Youngest. That smile is hung right on your mouth. Has something good happened?"
Long arms, and ears of a good size. A man of a kindly impression, yet with eyes sunk still and calm without end. It would be no exaggeration to call him the protagonist of this age: Liu Bei.
His voice was not merely pleasant to hear. A power dwelt in it that set the heart at ease and quietly bent a person toward following him. An ordinary man would have laid his innermost thoughts bare at once, but to Zhang Fei it was a familiar thing.
When Zhang Fei broke into laughter at Liu Bei's question, Guan Yu, beside him, spoke in his place.
"He went home after a long while, did he not?"
The words meant that of course his mood would be good, having seen his family — but Liu Bei saw through at a glance that Zhang Fei's joy was not that alone. Guan Yu was not unaware of it either, yet with the decisive struggle for mastery of Jingzhou before them, he thought little of it. Liu Bei was different.
"It does not seem to be only that. Will you not tell this foolish brother of yours?"
"I meant to bring it to Eldest Brother in any case."
Zhang Fei put the laughter away and returned to his usual composure. What he was about to say was no mere matter of the household.
"Do you remember what you said the other day, Brother?"
"Something I said?"
"About binding our families by marriage."
"Ah, yes. I remember it well. We were to marry Adou to your daughter. But why do you ask?"
"Mm... Brother."
Zhang Fei opened his mouth with difficulty.
"That marriage — would it be all right if it were not my eldest, Lan, but my second daughter, Yan?"
"You fool! What are you saying!"
Guan Yu roared, flushing a face already red a deeper shade still.
Before he was their sworn elder brother, Liu Bei was their lord. For such a Liu Bei to have proposed the marriage in person, and then to be offered the second daughter rather than the eldest, was discourtesy beyond measure.
Had it been anyone but Zhang Fei, Guan Yu might have drawn his blade on the spot. But because it was Zhang Fei and no one else, he meant to turn that arrogant temper to shielding him.
The roar was less a true rebuke than a wish to scold Zhang Fei within his own bounds, smooth the matter over, and so cover the discourtesy. But was such a heart Guan Yu's alone?
Far from showing anger, Liu Bei smiled with benign kindness and asked in return:
"For what reason?"
At his brothers' consideration, Zhang Fei delayed no further.
"Lan wishes to enter the army."
"The army?"
It was not even that some other match had appeared. At an answer he had never imagined, the words sprang reflexively from Guan Yu's mouth.
"Yes. From what I hear, he brought his daughter into the camp."
Liu Bei already knew that Zhang Lan was training as the soldiers did. Guan Yu and Zhang Fei were younger brothers to him, a left arm and a right; news of them reached Liu Bei whole, and it would have been stranger had a thing as unusual as this failed to reach him.
"Yes. I did."
"It was a decision you made, so I took it that you had a reason worthy of it."
Zhang Fei laid out, piece by piece, what he had lived through: the words Zhang Lan had spoken when he returned home, the resolve she had shown by cutting her own hair, the phrase about looking on one another with new eyes, and the bout he had fought with her.
"Lan was born to a gift for arms."
"Even so, is she not a girl? In childhood a girl may be fiercer than a boy and grow the faster, but in the end she cannot overcome a man."
At Guan Yu's orthodox judgment, Zhang Fei nodded heavily.
"You are right, Brother. But Lan is different. If you saw her with your own eyes, you would understand what I mean. She was born with divine strength, as you and I were. It was no feat of power a child of nine could show — and a child who had not even properly learned the martial arts."
"Oh? So that is how it is."
At Zhang Fei's insistence Liu Bei narrowed his eyes and sank into thought. Guan Yu and Zhang Fei were watching him when the entrance of the tent was flung wide.
"My lord, forgive me for coming late."
A tall frame and handsome looks that did not fall short even beside Guan Yu and Zhang Fei — and who he was was plain from nothing more than the silk cap on his head and the crane-feather fan in his hand.
Zhuge Liang. Zhuge Kongming. The man who had surpassed even the greatest of his age to become the very incarnation of the wise minister, and the byword for one.
When Zhuge Liang entered, Liu Bei opened wide the eyes he had held half-shut and welcomed him.
"Come in, Military Advisor. Come, this way."
"Yes, my lord."
Zhuge Liang took his place at Liu Bei's side and tried to read the subtle air within the tent. But Liu Bei had no mind to draw out any further the talk from before he arrived.
"Yide, we will take this up another time. Together with that child."
"Yes, my lord."
Zhang Fei knew how to tell the public from the private, and so he answered with due form.
At the words that child, Zhuge Liang grasped at once what sort of talk had been passing until a moment before. But considering the particular bond among the three brothers — Liu, Guan, and Zhang — he judged there was no need for him to pry. A lord's household affairs were no mere household affairs, but a weighty matter for the whole power; and yet among those three, it was not a place one stepped into lightly.
Still.
I ought to look into it.
The girl already set aside as wife to Liu Shan, who might one day be his Later Lord. Zhang Lan.