Talents Come Gathering
Ma Zhong was a celebrated general of Shu-Han who came into his own in the later years of the Three Kingdoms, and his debut had been a blazing one: he saved Liu Bei when the catastrophe at Yiling had left the emperor in mortal peril. Liu Bei is said to have praised him to the skies, declaring that though he had lost Huang Quan, he had gained Ma Zhong in his place.
The Ma Zhong I had known first, however, was not Shu-Han's general but Wu's. The man who entered the histories for no greater feat than capturing Guan Yu was granted even Red Hare in the Romance, in recognition of that merit — and that was the whole of him.
What carried him was purely the symbolism of landing the final blow on Guan Yu. His actual ability had surely been nothing special. He met a wretched end after incurring the hatred of Luo Guanzhong, that partisan of Shu, but that is beside the point.
I had only learned of the name through that namesake, yet Shu-Han's Ma Zhong was a talent of an entirely different order from Wu's. He excelled with both brush and blade, possessed a high gift for administration, and had a talent for command besides. Virtue was his as well, and he was said to be especially brilliant at governing the non-Han tribes. When he died, every one of the tribal peoples who had known him shed tears, which gives some measure of how deeply he was loved.
True to such a man, the Ma Zhong standing before me was a magnificent figure and no mistake. A little over five foot seven, much of a height with Ma Dai, and though he was a civil official his frame was so well set that he seemed to train on his own time. A talent of both pen and sword indeed.
"I was told you had summoned this humble one."
Younger-looking even than Liu Yin and Ma Dai, Ma Zhong had a face that seemed not yet to have entered its thirties. My sense of age was still calibrated to my previous life, so by the standards of this era he was remarkably youthful.
"Yes. I hear you are from Baxi Commandery. I asked for you in the hope that you would serve as our guide in the subjugation of the Ba tribes."
"I am only a common commandery clerk. Please speak freely, General."
"You are not yet my subordinate, sir. How could I?"
"I have undertaken to guide the General, so I am naturally attached to the General's command."
So that's a yes. Zhang Fei's influence had gone into the request, of course, which made refusal all but impossible — but the words had come from Ma Zhong's own mouth first, and fortunately he didn't seem to dislike the idea of following me.
And yet he kept failing to meet my eyes, turning his gaze aside.
Well. It feels absurd to say this about myself, but I understand. Even I, the person in question, am sometimes startled when I happen to look into a bronze mirror. Part of it is simply that I almost never look, so I'm not used to the sight — but even familiarity wouldn't change the fact that it is a face worth admiring.
At any rate, Ma Zhong had arrived, and I went straight into council.
Time is gold.
There was no telling when Zhang Lu would fall. Wang Ping would follow the chieftains of the Ba to Luoyang and enter Cao Cao's service. I didn't know the exact date, but it would not be a distant future. By autumn at the latest, he would already be gone.
"Time is short. If we don't settle them while they are still watching which way the wind blows between Zhang Lu and Cao Cao, we'll hand Cao Cao an opening to step in."
When I addressed them with full formality, their eyes grew a degree more grave.
"So the question now is how we draw those fellows out. If you have a good idea, don't hesitate to speak."
At my opening of the council, Ma Dai, Liu Yin, and Ma Zhong looked at one another's faces in a daze. They seemed, for all the world, at a loss for how they were meant to take what I had said. I had been expecting the flashing stratagems of generals whose names rang through history, and for an instant I even wondered whether I had said something wrong.
"My lords?"
"G-General. Do you truly not know?"
"Pardon?"
The scene was familiar. Back in my previous life, when I was tutoring, there had been moments just like this: an easy problem, me letting a hint of ignorance show, and a student wavering between is this an act or is it real while agonizing over what to say. And if it had actually come out that I didn't know, I would have lost my dignity as a teacher and been dropped from the job.
I can't lose my dignity as a general!
I seized control of my expression and spoke at once.
"Ah, hahaha — found me out, have you? I was testing you, just for a moment. Of course I know."
"Heh. After all, it is rather an embarrassing thing for the General to say aloud herself."
"Indeed. We ought to have spoken before the General had to ask. Forgive us."
No — so what is it? They couldn't mean those fellows were blockheads who would come charging in on their own two feet.
While I darted my eyes about, taking the measure of the three of them, they laughed among themselves and traded thoughts on how the engagement ought to be fought. I was racking my brains in desperation over what this lure for the enemy was supposed to be, when Ma Zhong's remark cut through the council like a shaft of light.
"But first, ought we not to spread a rumor?"
"And what need is there for that?"
"Quite. Word will already be running wild through Baxi Commandery. It will have reached their ears as well."
"Mm. Even so..."
"You're a man yourself — what are you worrying about? A man's ears are made to catch talk of fighting and of women faster than anything else, and here the two come bundled together. They couldn't miss it if they tried."
Fighting? Women? The only woman here is me, isn't it? Don't tell me...
"The fame of Heavenly Maiden Hui already rings through Jing and Yi. How are they supposed to hold back? They'll come charging. No question of it."
Thus Ma Dai, putting into practice the old warning that it is the surely not that gets a person killed.
And what, exactly, was Heavenly Maiden Hui? Was my nickname evolving without my even knowing?
Liu Yin drove the wedge in after him.
"If this isn't the perfect, orthodox form of the eleventh of the Thirty-Six Stratagems — the Beauty Trap — then what is? Mm."
Is this even right?
A word without feet travels a thousand li. Just as the proverb says of how fast talk spreads — and just as Ma Dai had said in council — the rumor that I had come to Baxi Commandery raced out as if the internet itself existed in this age.
In the few days I spent seeing to supplies before the march, I had only to step out of the official residence for people to come swarming, all of them insisting they must see me. The crowds were so thick I found myself wondering whether a frontier commandery like Baxi could really hold so many souls. Ba — Ba Commandery and Baxi Commandery alike — is the country of the non-Han peoples called the Ba, the Board-Shield tribes I meant to bring to heel chief among them, and much of it still lay outside Liu Bei's reach. Even so, they came. There would, of course, be refugees among them: folk from other commanderies and counties who had fled to Langzhong County and its surroundings, lands under Liu Bei, after they could no longer endure the bandits and the tribes.
Is this what a celebrity trailed by obsessive fans feels like?
No. Those people have it worse. I at least have rank and office, so the crowds only dare to look. Obsessive fans break in. They stalk.
I really ought to get myself a mask.
The soldiers, at least, had seen enough of me by now to have more or less adjusted, which was a mercy. If they had gawked at me the way those commoners did — as if I were a monkey in a menagerie — it would have been no small trouble. Imagine them ignoring orders and simply staring at me in a daze. What kind of army is that?
Leaving the fervent send-off of Langzhong's people behind me, I began the march. The first objective was Hanchang County, northeast of Langzhong — two o'clock, if one read the map as a clock face.
The land of Ba divides broadly into three regions, Baxi, Bazhong, and Badong, known together as the Three Ba. Hanchang lies in Bazhong, a county with a mountain range crouched directly above it, so the Ba tribes came down often to raid. To keep them from slipping away through Hanzhong or Badong and fleeing to Cao Cao, I meant to clear the Hanchang area first and only then turn south.
Ma Zhong, himself a man of Langzhong, heard the plan and nodded, calling the route an efficient one. Of course he did. The line of march was copied straight from the road Zhang He would later take when he invaded Baxi — Zhang He, one of Wei's Five Elite Generals.
According to Ma Zhong, the chieftain of the Ba near Hanchang was a man named Du Huo. He was one of the three who would surrender to Cao Cao and receive both a marquisate and the office of Grand Administrator, only to be beaten back later by Huang Quan.
The battle itself isn't the problem.
Ma Dai and Liu Yin might be young and short on experience, but were they really going to fail against a man of Du Huo's measure? And I was here as well. I could not imagine us losing. The danger was that the enemy would take fright and hide, or simply run. My two deputy generals insisted that my very existence was the Beauty Trap, and that luring the foe was therefore nothing to worry about — but taking that at face value sat poorly with me. I had been a man once, and even now my sense of myself as a man ran deep. I could not shake the thought that this was simply not right.
So I had a scouting party out on its own, and from them came a report that a body of men was approaching.
"Hm? Already?"
An encounter this soon seemed to catch the others off guard as well. They looked puzzled, yet they formed up with care all the same. Ma Dai, who had less to arrange since he led the cavalry, was back at my side before long.
"Judging by how few they are, I doubt they are the enemy."
"I am of the same mind."
With Ma Dai I still used a half-formal register, not the plain downward speech of a commander to a subordinate. Set age aside, and Liu Yin was beneath me in both post and station; count my previous life, and he fell short in years as well, so I had little reservation with him. Ma Dai was different. Considering the weight the Ma clan carried in Liang Province, and considering his elder brother Ma Chao, speaking down to him outright would have been the stranger choice.
Horses are precious in Yi Province, and so the unfamiliar company came entirely on foot.
"A hundred or so."
Ma Dai's murmur. The numbers were small, and the arms they bore were poor. Not regular troops.
The man walking at their head was, unexpectedly, a youth. He looked to have only just passed the capping age. Hoping to ease our wariness, he halted his people and stepped forward alone.
"Halt. Who are you?"
Liu Yin, serving as vanguard commander as well, put the question, and the youth bowed with crisp propriety. The way he kept to the rites made plain that he had been properly taught.
"This humble one is Gou Fu, a man of Hanchang County. We heard that the General of the Assisting Guard — the niece of the Lord of Yi Province — had come forth in person to sweep away the Ba tribes, and though our strength is meager, we gathered in the hope of aiding the General."
Gou Fu? Gou Fu?
"Huyan, I'll speak with him myself."
"Yes, General."
I rode forward along the path Liu Yin had opened and drew up before Gou Fu, and tension rose in his face. It left me with the queer feeling that I had come down with a princess complex — and yet I wanted to give him points for this: face to face with me, he did not stare blankly, but managed his expression with a cool head.
In truth, Gou Fu was not a widely famous man. The records of Shu are simply too thin. But his obscurity to later ages seems to have stood at odds with a considerable reputation in his own. I knew of him entirely because of Wang Ping. Of all the figures of the later Three Kingdoms, Wang Ping was the one I liked best: a surrendered officer, illiterate, dogged even by whispers that he was of the tribes, and still the man who won great merit at the Battle of Luo Valley. A triumph of sheer human grit. How could I not like a man like that? Jiang Wei has his own romance, carrying his teacher's dying wish through to the end, but Wang Ping has always sat better with me than Jiang Wei does.
Gou Fu's name was set shoulder to shoulder with that Wang Ping's. There was even a saying: Before, there were Wang Ping and Gou Fu; after, there were Zhang Yi and Liao Hua. Posterity itself acknowledges Wang Ping's ability, so the man compared with him must have been a considerable general. I had thought that someday I would seek him out and take him into service. I had not thought to meet him this soon. I hadn't even known he was from Hanchang, and yet here we were.
I had pictured only Ma Zhong and Wang Ping, more or less, as the deputy generals of my military staff. And now Ma Dai as well, and Gou Fu besides?
At this rate it's the all-star roster of Shu's middle and later years.
Ma Dai carries a little of the Romance's inflation, but the mere fact of his birth in the Ma clan is already more than enough for him to pull a man's full weight. Wang Ping and Gou Fu are representative generals of Shu in its middle period, and Ma Zhong is a talent whom Liu Bei himself set beside Huang Quan, that genius of tactics. Even the three of them, without Wang Ping, were an ox-cleaver taken to the killing of a chicken, if all one meant to do was pacify the tribes.
I dismounted and approached Gou Fu. As I drew near he flinched and turned his head aside. I laid my hand over the two of his, which he held clasped in formal courtesy.
"Your loyal devotion does you true honor. I accept you, and the volunteers of Hanchang, with a glad heart."
"General..."
Gou Fu looked up at me, his face steeped in feeling. Then, as if the sight of my face had settled some resolve in him, he flung himself flat where he stood and bowed.
"I will give you all my loyalty! Please allow me to guard your side."
"Uh... hm?"
What was that sudden lurch? A talent like Gou Fu swearing himself to me this easily left me dazed before it left me glad. I hadn't thought holding his hand once would bring him out like this. Was the threshold for being moved really so low? For my part, if Gou Fu came under me on the spot, I could only count it a blessing beyond my deserts.
Before he could collect himself and walk the words back, I raised him quickly and spoke.
"How could I turn away a sincere heart that wishes to stand with me? If you and your volunteers are willing, I will formally take you into my command, and I will make you a garrison captain. I look forward to seeing you show the full of your skill in the battle ahead."
Once I had formally received him, he answered with a resolute face.
"My courtesy name is Xiaoxing, so please speak freely, General. I shall break bone and body before I betray the trust you place in me."
Good. I would be praying he won merit this time. How else was I supposed to promote him quickly?
I patted his shoulder, putting encouragement into it.
Ah — if only Wang Ping would walk in on top of this. Give the cavalry to Ma Dai, set a line of three colonels in Liu Yin, Wang Ping, and Gou Fu, and make Ma Zhong the Campaign Major I myself had once been, and I felt I could grow full just watching them drill.
Wait for me, Wang Ping. I'll be there soon.