The Wind from the North
The country around Dangqu County was ill-suited to a pitched battle. The mountains ran steep and broken, and tributary streams cut the valleys, denying any army the open ground a formal engagement required.
Yet anyone marching out of Hanzhong into the Baxi region Liu Bei held had no choice but to pass through it. Father had made Dangqu his battlefield for that very reason, meaning to lean on the ground itself and so erase the disadvantage of fewer men.
Zhang He understood the design. Abandon Dangqu, and the only road left ran to Jiameng Pass, a fortress all but impossible to storm. Knowing full well what Father intended, he prepared for battle anyway.
War in the mountains is a different creature from the fighting men do on level ground. Trees and rock shut off the view. Horses cannot run, and word travels late because of it. The slope itself decides who attacks and who can only hold.
For one commander to wield an army there as a single living body would have been impossible even if Han Xin had risen from the grave.
"So we divide the army."
A massed host was the wrong shape for this country. A scattering of flying columns would serve better.
"Ma Dai, Liu Yin, Ma Zhong, Ju Fu, Wang Ping. Each of you takes five hundred men and acts on your own judgment."
Ma Zhong held the post of Army Advisor on the March, but he also had the talent to command a force of his own. There was no reason to leave him out.
"I will move with the remaining five hundred. A portion of the men, however, I am drawing off to serve as couriers and nothing else, so that word can pass among us without delay."
From the men of Ba Commandery, who came and went through the mountains as if the ridges were their own courtyards, I picked a courier corps, and I set it to keep intelligence flowing cleanly between each flying column and the main body under Father. If we were to avoid being cut apart one unit at a time, that link was essential.
"If the Cao army comes on in strength, do not force a fight. Give ground. Send word to the main body, and they will answer it."
We were the defenders. In the history I remembered, Zhang He had to be driven off at once, both to stop him hauling the people of Baxi off into Hanzhong and to keep the hearts of Yizhou from wavering. This was not that war.
Liu Bei's rule had already begun to take root in Yizhou, and the people of Baxi Commandery had been moved back as far as we could move them. There was no cause to break ourselves forcing Zhang He from the field.
If we simply hold until Liu Bei settles the quarrel in Jingzhou and comes home, the victory is ours.
"I wish you all good fortune in battle."
"And you, General. Take care of yourself."
I watched the deputy commanders depart, and then I followed.
"We march as well."
Against the chance of a fight at Dangqu, I had spent the days beforehand learning the county's ground through Wang Ping. The officers under me were men of real ability, and they too had the country around us in their heads, so I split the force without hesitation and began to thread the mountains.
Zhang He had not yet settled a proper camp or finished reading the terrain. What we fought now was only the skirmish before the storm. The enemy, too, moved in small bands, testing the ridges and keeping us in check.
It had been a long time since birdsong was heard in the mountains of Dangqu.
What filled that silence was the cold clash of iron, and the screams of men, sown like a sickness in the ear.
The smell of blood lay so thick it drowned the green scent of the grass, and even the beasts turned their heads away.
But humankind is sometimes a crueler breed than any beast, and so the fighting did not stop.
Steel rang.
I knocked aside the blade driving for my flank and, in the same turn, opened the soldier's throat. Blood burst from him and soaked the earth.
One stroke, one life. I let the sword flow as a river bends, and I cut as lightning falls.
I fought to keep my own men alive before I fought to destroy the enemy. A week had already passed since the battle of Dangqu began. Grown used to fighting among the ridges, I pulled our soldiers clear whenever they were in danger, and whenever the enemy hesitated I drove in without mercy and tore their line apart.
Every step I pressed farther ahead was another soldier who lived.
There was no rest. The Cao army, leaning on its numbers, kept coming, and the pressure wore at us the way a relay of fresh troops grinds a weary line down. Our men knew the mountains, yes, but set a fight upon that knowledge in which life itself was the stake, and the fatigue piled high.
"The enemy is falling back!"
"Don't pursue."
A little more damage from a chase was worth less to me than rest for our own.
As I remembered it, the grinding fight at Dangqu had lasted more than a month. This battle was not the same as the one in the histories, but the current of it was running close enough. It would go on for a long while yet.
"If there is anything worth taking, take it quickly, and see to our dead and wounded. We rejoin the main body."
It was time to come down off the mountain and rest. Even while the soldiers bustled about their work, I stood watch with a handful of men, wary that the Cao troops might come again.
What caught my eye was not a counterattack. It was one of our own couriers, running as if the ground were on fire.
"General! Army Advisor Ma Zhong requests support!"
"Ma Zhong?"
Of the men I could call my own, Ma Zhong was the weakest with a blade. Even so, he stood closer to a military officer than a civil one, and he had the eye to read a situation and the nerve to decide. He was not a man who fell into danger easily.
Their commander is no ordinary man.
Our enemy was no petty strongman or stockade chief. This was the elite of Cao Cao, the man who had mastered the Central Plains—the strongest of strong armies. If some talent appeared out of nowhere and broke Ma Zhong, it would not be strange at all.
"Stop the looting! Those who aren't badly hurt will help the seriously wounded down the mountain. Everyone else, with me. Lead the way."
"Yes, sir!"
The soldiers who heard the courier threw down whatever they were holding and formed ranks without a word.
We followed him only a short while before the sound of fighting began to reach us, thin with distance. There were many screams.
Unlike the fight I had just left, this was no one-sided beating. Both sides were locked in a savage melee.
Anxiety clawed at me. I swallowed the urge to sprint and moved with care.
Charging in blind would mean nothing if we arrived too spent to fight—all the more so when the enemy, like us, might have relief of their own on the way.
Ma Zhong will hold.
I forced the fear down and set belief in its place.
And Ma Zhong repaid that belief.
"Reinforcements! The Guangwei General is here!"
He had held until I arrived.
At his shout the soldiers wrung the last of their strength into a roar and drove in on the Cao troops.
I looked for their commander. I had seen enough on the way in to know the advantage lay plainly with Cao's men. The numbers were close. They had more, but not by much.
If even so he had seized the upper hand against Ma Zhong, then their commander was either a famous general already, or a man with the makings of one.
I have to cut the sprout here.
Cao Cao had already swept a Central Plains rich in talent. When the chance came, I had to take as many of those men off the board as I could.
"You..."
Finding me breaking straight for him, the enemy commander lifted his eyes, and the dismay on his face was strangely out of proportion.
Enemies who met me usually knew who I was at a glance, because I was a woman, and surprise was the ordinary answer. Even allowing for that, his reaction was too large. It did not fit.
An opening.
Being a woman worked in my favor at moments like this. Men who met an opponent they had not expected on a battlefield always showed a gap, and I never missed it.
This time was different.
Before my blade could reach him he had mastered his face and turned my attack aside with ease, as if the look he had worn were nothing but an act. A vicious counterstroke grazed the nape of my neck, and with it came the thought that he might have shown me a weakness on purpose, merely to draw me in.
Luckily it had only kissed the skin—a thin sting—but it was my first wound of the battle.
"Was that an act?"
He answered me with silence. To my eye, though, it had not been an act. Method acting has its limits. If that expression had been a performance, the man had never taken a lesson in his life and still possessed the skill to carry off an Oscar.
"It doesn't matter either way."
He was an enemy. That was all.
Then what I had to do was fight, and win.
Before the real fight began, I offered him one last chance.
"Surrender, and I'll let you live."
"I'll return the offer as you gave it. Come over to us, and I will guarantee your safety myself."
A strange sense of having lived the moment before settled over me.
His words were not the mechanical courtesy men toss out by habit. I heard a raw, earnest sincerity in them—a sincerity aimed at me as a person, with no regard for my sex or my face.
But it was too late to stop. We had met on a battlefield. To struggle was our duty.
He was strong. Power exploded out of a body long hardened, and his swordwork was something to admire. Of every enemy I had faced, he was far and away the finest.
Even so...
Blade met blade. In raw strength we were even, or I held the edge by a hair. Our swordwork was nearly the same.
He looked at least ten years older than I was. Set against that, my own talent was the more startling of the two.
I win.
He gave everything he had. He fought with all his might, furiously, as if the familiarity I had felt were nothing but a trick of the mind.
If he had truly carried some feeling for me and let hesitation into his sword, I would have taken his head long before.
The end of a fight in which each of us wrung out every last ounce of strength was a draw. Ma Zhong shouted that Cao reinforcements had arrived, and I was the one who broke away first. I could do it only because I held the advantage.
A little more time would have been welcome. But that is the old sickness: take Long, and already you are looking toward Shu. Desire invites ruin, and there is wisdom in knowing when to withdraw.
The Cao army, too, seemed to judge that fighting on would cost more than it gained. A lull settled over the field of its own accord, and little by little we drew apart.
As the clash wound toward its end, it was the Cao side that turned its back first.
Before I knew what I was doing, I called after the commander as he receded.
"You there!"
How did he know the call was meant for him? He heard my voice, stopped dead, and turned half around to look at me.
"What is your name?"
At the question his face grew complicated past any easy reading. What was this? Had I seen him somewhere? I had not met anyone from Wei since the fighting in Nan Commandery.
And yet, somehow, I felt a strange familiarity in him as well.
He answered my question with a question.
"Is Xi'er well?"
"Xi'er?"
The question came out of nowhere. I tilted my head and repeated it.
I thought for only a moment about who that might be. Then a single hypothesis rose in my mind, and my eyes went wide.
"Don't tell me. You..."
Xi. That was my mother's name.
And if a man of Wei called her Xi'er, there was no excuse for failing to know who he was.
"You're of the Xiahou clan."
"Yes. I am Xiahou Ba, second son of the Marquis of Bochang."
The Marquis of Bochang was Xiahou Yuan's title. Which meant this man was the elder cousin of my mother, Xiahou Xi—and an uncle to me.
"Tell Xi'er this. Father still grieves for her. Even now, he longs for her."
Private talk with an enemy commander on a battlefield breeds suspicion no one needs. The moment Xiahou Ba had said what he came to say, he turned.
I shouted at his retreating back.
"Uncle! Do not forget! So long as I live, we will gladly receive your allegiance whenever you choose to offer it!"
No answer came back. Xiahou Ba went on, farther and farther, leaving the shout behind him. Only when his back had vanished entirely did I turn my own feet toward our camp.