The Battle of Xiabian
Jian'an 23, the year 218 — Chengdu, in Yi Province.
Liu Bei sat in the high seat of the great hall and looked down upon the host of ministers, civil and military. They were the sum of everything his life had built.
Zhuge Liang. Fa Zheng. Mi Zhu. Sun Qian. Jian Yong. Liu Ba. Li Yan. Yi Ji. Huang Quan. Every one of them a prodigy of the age, bright with talent, and men whose names would one day shake the realm stood guard at his side.
Nor was it the civil officers alone. Zhao Yun, Chen Dao, Huang Zhong, Ma Chao, Pang De, Wei Yan — the martial ranks were thick with famous generals, each a byword for valor.
After a long life of wandering he had at last made an end of it and raised a ground of his own, and the men gathered there were the surest proof that the road he had walked was not a mistake.
With them he would go out to the wish of his life: a decisive battle against the enemy he had borne all his years. The first cup of that wine was Fa Zheng's excellent counsel.
"Cao Cao has presumed to call himself King of Wei, and revolt does not cease in the Central Plains. That he took Hanzhong and still did not lead his whole host south springs from the same cause. Able though he is, he had no choice but to leave Xiahou Yuan and Zhang He behind him and turn back. The generals holding Hanzhong for Cao Cao are no match for our own. Now is the time to strike."
"Xiaozhi is right."
There was no hesitation left in him.
Liu Bei's resolve was already set. Nothing remained to put off, and nothing to look away from. There was only the road that met the enemy head-on.
"Send the summons through the whole army. I will take the field myself."
At that declaration the air of the hall drew tight, as if lightning had struck it. They had thrown Cao Cao's armies back in succession — at Red Cliffs, at Nanjun, at Dangqu — and still the name Cao Cao was never a light thing to carry.
The vast shadow of the hegemon of the Central Plains reached, all unnoticed, into the heart of every man there. Liu Bei himself was no exception. But he, and those who meant to face the appointed battle without flinching, carried as well the courage and the faith to outlast that shadow.
Not all of them could. Among those gathered in the hall were ordinary men, and others who served under Liu Bei while nursing, in some deep place, a resentment of him.
They did not want war. Yet they knew that common argument would never overturn Fa Zheng's case or Liu Bei's decision, and so they borrowed the strength of Heaven.
"Colonel of the Confucian Forest Zhou Qun begs leave to speak."
Zhou Qun had made it his profession to read the future in the stars and the weather. Arts such as astrology were received in that age even as learning, and because his forecasts so often proved true, he was trusted.
Perhaps some thin unease still lingered in Liu Bei himself. He granted the man leave without reluctance.
"Speak."
"This humble servant has read the course of the heavens. Raise a great host, and you will gain the land, but you will not gain the people. Better to gather your strength a while longer, make firm what you hold, and wait upon the finer hour that is yet to come."
Liu Bei made no answer. He only sank into a low, thoughtful silence, and rather than give yes or no at once, he turned to another man.
"What did you see, Nanhua?"
Nanhua was the courtesy name of Zhang Yu. In divination and the reading of faces his gift outstripped even Zhou Qun's, and Liu Zhang had made him an Attendant Official of Yi Province.
To Zhang Yu, who had followed Liu Zhang, Liu Bei was no lord worthy of loyalty. He was a usurper who had betrayed a kinsman of the same clan, seized Yi Province, and was obeyed only because there was no other choice.
Liu Bei was not ignorant of it. The two of them had already taken slices from each other under the cover of a joke: Liu Bei laughing at Zhang Yu's thick, unkempt beard, Zhang Yu sneering that Liu Bei had no beard at all.
Now Liu Bei put the question to that same man with his own mouth. In part it was because Zhang Yu was the finest diviner in the province. Zhuge Liang, and a few others, saw farther than that and understood what their lord intended.
Zhuge Liang sighed where no one could hear him.
His Lordship means to drive Zhang Yu out at last.
Zhang Yu was not a man who could dress his thoughts in pleasing words merely to live. He would say exactly what he thought, and a sour word spoken on the eve of so grave a design as Hanzhong would be pretext enough for a purge.
Called upon, Zhang Yu took one step forward, and then could not make himself speak. Only his lips stirred.
"Why do you not answer?"
"...When I looked upon the stars, the realm was in due course to pass to the house of Cao, and you, my lord, were to lose within ten years everything you had gained."
It was insolence at its peak. Liu Bei had raised the restoration of a Liu realm as his great cause, and Zhang Yu told him to his face that the cause was empty and his power doomed. That was less courage than recklessness, and folly besides.
The words were so presumptuous that even Zhuge Liang, who valued the man's talent, went white and bowed his head. Liu Bei asked again all the same.
"You say it was so. Do you mean it is different now?"
"...Yes. It is."
Zhang Yu made no effort to hide how little he wanted to say it, and the words came out because they must. The killing air in the hall, which a moment before had seemed ready to cry for his head, eased.
"Then what of the present?"
Zhang Yu looked as though he meant never to open his mouth. He was a man who could declare, without a tremor, that Liu Bei's power would fall, yet the omen he had read of late — the omen that had reversed — was one he desperately did not want past his lips.
But for a diviner to hide an omen was itself a betrayal of his creed. Loyalty as Liu Zhang's vassal warred in him against the pride he bore as a reader of signs, and in the end the latter won.
Irresponsible, in its way. And yet, because the speaker was Zhang Yu, the words arrived instead as something hopeful.
Cao Cao had suffered the great defeat at Red Cliffs, but he was already the hegemon seated on the heart of the Central Plains. Set against that, what Liu Bei held was a bare third of Jing Province — not even half a province — and a Yi Province from which Hanzhong had already been torn away.
Even so, to be told that if he played the board well he might yet make a fight of it was to rate his strength as high as words could reach.
Liu Bei rose. He drew the sword at his waist.
The cry of steel through the great hall was the overture of the war to come.
Clang!
He drove the drawn blade straight down, as if to say that dissent would not be suffered. The sword standing in the table was the emblem of a resolve that would not bend.
"I leave Chengdu to the Military Counselor General. Xiaozhi, Gongheng — you will follow me. Zhengfang will see to the peace of Yi Province, and Shuzhi will assist him. Every other commander goes with me to Hanzhong."
So he entrusted Yi Province to Zhuge Liang and the army to Li Yan and Chen Dao, and he chose Fa Zheng and Huang Quan as the strategists of the war.
Before a command as stern as autumn frost, everyone gathered in the hall bent at the waist as one.
"The army is raised. We move with the speed of lightning. Order Wu Lan and Lei Tong to advance on Xiabian in Wudu. Yide and Mingjing will support them. Let there not be a hair's deviation."
"Is that so? So that's what was said."
Liu Bei's orders arrived together with the news of what had passed in Chengdu, and I murmured the words, a little startled.
I did not know Zhang Yu well. I did know that Liu Bei had put him to death despite Zhuge Liang's objections. By that measure the man must have grated on Liu Bei past all endurance — and yet for him to have said a thing like that...
He may truly have read that the future has changed.
I put Zhang Yu out of my mind at once. Lean on a thing like that and nothing changes. If any part of what he said was right, it was this: everything depends on human effort.
The generals gathered in the council hall had heard Ma Zhong's report, and they were drawing their fighting spirit up with it.
They had already beaten Zhang He once, that senior general of Cao Cao's. Victory, once tasted, drives out fear and plants courage in its place.
"His Lordship has ordered us to support Generals Wu Lan and Lei Tong together with the General Who Subdues the Caitiffs. We should make for Jiameng Pass first."
Jiameng Pass was the first gate of Yi Province, or near enough. It was the place he had sent Huo Jun to hold during the campaign that took the province, and it was also the mouth of the road from Yi Province toward Hanzhong and Wudu.
"I'll send a courier to the General Who Subdues the Caitiffs as well. To tell him we'll join him at Jiameng Pass."
Wang Si, who had charge of the couriers, said it, and the company made no objection, which was as good as assent. I turned to Ma Zhong.
"Dexin. Where are General Lei Tong and General Wu Lan?"
"Garrisoned at Jiange."
"Then Jiameng Pass is the work of a moment for them. They'll already be into Xiabian before the General Who Subdues the Caitiffs and I can join them."
"Most likely."
On the tactical map the road ran Jiange, Jiameng Pass, Xiabian, and if one followed it farther up, Tianshui lay at the end of it. East of Tianshui was Chang'an.
Chang'an — the heart of Cao Cao's power.
"Once those two pass Jiameng Pass, Cao Cao will send an army to Xiabian as well."
"Of course."
"Then he'll send cavalry."
Look at the ground, and taking cavalry from Chang'an all the way to Hanzhong is brutally hard. Hanzhong is a basin to begin with, and between it and Chang'an the Qinling range spreads in savage mountain country.
A man can barely get in at all except along the perilous tracks called the plank roads, and bringing horses that way is more dangerous still.
So Cao Cao would have no reason to haul cavalry to Hanzhong by the plank roads. He would sooner send them around through Tianshui and down on Xiabian.
By the time I had said that much, the generals had seen what I was thinking. They were outstanding commanders in their own right, the men who would carry Shu Han through its middle years and after. Inexperience was still their limit, but give them a single clue and they had talent to spare for reading a campaign at a glance.
"You're afraid they'll be destroyed in detail."
"Yes. If he has cavalry, a standoff will form at Xiabian before we ever arrive. He'll try to force a decision before our people can join."
We needed to hurry. The cavalry under Cao Cao's hand was the famous Tiger and Leopard Cavalry, and the man who led it was Cao Xiu, one of the kinsmen-generals Cao Cao took such pride in.
Unless Father and Ma Chao had fully joined them, Wu Lan and Lei Tong alone were staring down far too great a weight.
"We'll have to hurry."
"Xiaoxing and I will attend you. Divide the cavalry from the infantry."
At Ma Dai's words, Ju Fu nodded as well.
"He's right. Ride with cavalry alone, and we can arrive even ahead of the General Who Subdues the Caitiffs."
"Good. The barding for Xiaoxing's heavy cavalry I'll leave to the follow-on force."
Mobility was everything. The measure could not be skipped.
"I leave the seat I vacate to Zijun. Dexin, Shengzong — you come with these men."
I set Wang Ping as acting commander over the infantry, and with my guard, Ma Dai, and Ju Fu I rode at once for Jiameng Pass.
The stirrups took the edge off the exhaustion of the saddle, and we ate the distance at speed, reaching the pass in only a few days.
"One rest here. Then we go up to Xiabian."
Langzhong to Jiameng Pass was a shorter road than Langzhong to Dangqu. By the time we arrived, Father's army had already gone through.
"Father is moving quickly too."
He had seen the same danger: that they might be beaten piecemeal.
We rested a single day, and then I left Jiameng at once.
It really is a race against time.
Either I arrived first and reinforced them, or Wu Lan and Lei Tong broke before I could.