Chapter 47: The Battle of Mount Dingjun
"Zilian... did you say he is dead?"
"...Yes, King of Wei."
Cao Cao squeezed his eyes shut. Cao Hong—what manner of man had he been? When everyone else had vanished from his side and nothing remained but the wait for death, it was this brother who came running and gave up his own horse. He was the benefactor who had set the thread of life back in Cao Cao's grasp, declaring that the realm could do without Cao Hong, but it could not do without Cao Cao. There were kinsmen of greater ability than Cao Hong. There had never been one more loyal.
And that Cao Hong was dead. At the hands of none other than Liu Bei.
"Who was it."
"King of Wei..."
"I asked who. Who killed Zilian—I asked you who!!"
Cao Cao launched himself from the throne, stabbing a finger as he roared, the veins in his eyes standing proud until they burned a raw and furious red.
Hua Xin, the Grand Censor, took the whole of that wrath upon himself and still answered with a level voice.
"They say it was Zhang Fei, and his daughter Zhang Lan."
"Zhang Lan...? You mean the collateral granddaughter of Miaocai's line? Xiahou Yuan's blood?"
"So it is, King of Wei."
Zhang Lan. At the name, Cao Cao gave a hollow laugh and sank back onto the throne, letting his weight fall against it. It had been his own judgment that married Xiahou Hui—Zhang Fei's wife, and Zhang Lan's mother—to Zhang Fei. He had coveted Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei, and had meant to bind them by marriage and draw them into his fold.
"My greed killed you, Zilian."
A calamity summoned by his own rash desire. Had he never wed Zhang Fei to Xiahou Hui, Zhang Lan would never have been born. No—had he never been so sure he could make those three brothers his own men, had he simply killed them from the start...
"Prepare the army."
"King of Wei!"
Hua Xin and the ministers great and small rushed as one to pour out their objections, but Cao Cao's will was iron.
"Enough! I will not hear it. From this moment, anyone who opposes the expedition will be dealt with under military law!"
Having driven his ministers back with an order bared like a blade, Cao Cao ground his teeth and swore toward the brother who had now left his side forever.
Zilian. In Hanzhong, I will raise a rite for your soul.
A vengeance of blood.
A messenger brought word that the main body had reached Yangping Pass, was preparing its assault, and wanted support. Father and I were deep in counsel over what to do with Xiabian. Liu Bei had left the decision to Father, the commander in the field. Whether to hold Xiabian and keep Wudu in check, or to yield Xiabian and cross over to Yangping Pass, rested on his judgment.
"Better we make for Yangping Pass."
He chose the latter. "The Maming Gallery Road is ours, so Xiabian is worth far less than it was. Better to take Yangping Pass quickly, as things stand."
Ma Chao and Chen Shi, he said, had the Maming Gallery Road firmly in hand. Xu Huang had attacked to stop them and was in the midst of breaking Chen Shi when Ma Chao's army came down at the head of the Di who had submitted, struck him, and forced him to withdraw with little to show for it.
The Di chieftains Gangdan and Busang had come into Liu Bei's embrace together with more than a thousand tribal soldiers. More precisely, into Ma Chao's.
"I think the same."
When we moved, we moved swift as the wind. Following the chapter on contending armies in Sun Tzu's Art of War, we pulled out of Xiabian at speed—so quickly that the Wei troops lying low in Wudu, watching this side of the hills, never had time to notice.
Past the Maming Gallery Road under Chen Shi's guard, we came upon Yangping Pass, and for reasons none of us could name, banners bearing the name Liu were already streaming on the wind.
"Has it fallen already?"
"...So it has."
It had been a very long time since I had seen Father so thrown. The victory at Xiabian had brought back, he said, the feel of the old Zhang Yide, brimful of the nerve of younger days, and he had been all fire, swearing he would bring Yangping Pass down on the spot. Now it was as if someone had vented a pressure cooker of all its steam in a single pull.
Father and I passed at our leisure through the Yangping gate, thrown wide as if to welcome us. Liu Bei himself had come out to the gate, both arms spread toward us. At the sight of him we started and scrambled down from our horses. As if he grudged even the time it would take us to reach him, he closed the distance in long strides and crushed Father into an embrace, then me.
"Welcome! Well done, truly well done. Thanks to my brother and my niece, there isn't a day the flowers of laughter fail to bloom. Come—you've had a hard road of it. Inside, both of you."
"My lord, forgive the presumption, but what became of Yangping Pass?"
"Hahaha. Listen to you. A proper general now, aren't you—asking that the moment you arrive. I'll tell you while we walk."
Xiahou Yuan and Zhang He, who had been holding Yangping Pass, abandoned it outright and fell back to the rear the moment they learned that Xu Huang's attempt to cut the Maming Gallery Road had come to nothing, and that we, still posted at Xiabian, were coming down as well.
Hanzhong was being trampled underfoot by Liu Bei's army in the most literal sense, and still Cao Cao did not stir. It was not the hush before a storm. He simply had no leisure to spare Hanzhong a thought. In the first month of 218, Jin Yi, Geng Ji, Wei Huang, and Ji Ben rose in Xudu. In the fourth month, the Wuhuan chieftain Musinjeo rose in You Province. And though it had not yet come to pass, the original history still held the revolt of Hou Yin and Wei Kai, which broke out at Wancheng in Jing Province in the tenth month of 218. Rebellions detonating on every side without a pause to breathe, and, in the dark, the treachery of officials within the palace. Cao Cao was at his wits' end merely shuttling between Ye and Xudu to put revolt and conspiracy down. Even if he somehow reached Chang'an, it was an open question whether he could take any real hand in the fighting for Hanzhong.
Perhaps because that arithmetic lay before him, Liu Bei opened a banquet to mark the fall of Yangping Pass. In name it was to honor Father and me for the great victory at Xiabian, and to soothe soldiers worn raw by battle. Men were not machines. They could not fight without cease, and a measured rest was necessary. Nor were we reeling drunk on a victory of the moment, with no thought for what came next. Ma Chao and Chen Shi held Xu Huang in check from the Maming Gallery Road, and Zhao Yun and Huang Zhong stood in Xiahou Yuan's way. Above all, the war was breaking far more kindly than anyone had expected, and we had already asked Zhuge Liang in Yizhou for still greater support. Once the reinforcements and the supplies came out of Yizhou, we would drive straight through and seize Hanzhong in a single stroke. This was a breath drawn just before the full sprint.
So the banquet was laid, and a warm, easy air settled over the camp. Anxiety and fear of Cao Cao's army had thinned in the wash of victory upon victory until both were faint.
At last the banquet began. We were at war, so no wine was issued, but the mood alone was enough to make it worth enjoying.
Just as that mood was ripening to its full, a soldier whispered in Fa Zheng's ear, and Fa Zheng's face went cold with frightening speed.
"Xiaozhi. What on earth is it?"
"...My lord."
Wherever the calm of a moment before had gone, Fa Zheng stared at Liu Bei with a face locked hard. The slack the banquet had laid over us vanished before anyone marked its leaving. A ripple of tension that began with Fa Zheng spread through the whole hall. Every eye fixed on him, and then his lips parted.
"Cao Cao has left Ye. They say he has marched for Chang'an."
Cao Cao!
Where under heaven was there another man who could bind the very hearts and souls of heroes such as these with nothing but two syllables of a name? And yet the name Cao Cao made it possible. Liu Bei, too, let the smile fall from his face and set his cup down without a word, his look gone hard.
"If the banquet is to go on, those faces of yours will not do."
Only then did the generals set about schooling their expressions. There were exceptions—men like Zhao Yun, who had not so much as stirred from the start, and the sort of Ma Chao and Father, whose will to fight only burned hotter at the word that Cao Cao was coming—but they were few.
In that sunken air, Liu Bei did not rebuke his generals. He understood them.
"So do I. Cao Cao! A frightening man. All my life I have taken defeat after defeat at his hands. I lost Xuzhou. I failed His Majesty and had to flee. The might of a Cao Cao who holds Hebei and the Central Plains is fearful past all telling. That he can move this quickly even while lashed by loss upon loss and by rebellion at home—truly, the fame is no empty thing."
Liu Bei rose and began to walk slowly down the middle of the hall. Meeting their eyes one by one, he carried himself as unhurried as a man who had only stepped out to stroll among his generals.
"But what of now? Who was the victor at Red Cliffs? Who was it that suffered defeat in the struggle over Jing Province? Was there anyone who stopped us on the road to this Hanzhong? Well?"
He had always lost when he matched himself against Cao Cao, and still he did not lose his confidence. Whether that confidence was truly felt or only the performance of ease, it was plain he would not bend. He called every person in the hall by name and spoke with each of them. One he took by the hand, another he clapped on the shoulder, and with another he threw an arm about the neck. He never offered them the honeyed line that they must overcome their fear. What he did instead was impress upon them that he stood at their side, and remind them that they, too, carried memories of victory. That was Liu Bei's way of leading. Not the domineering charisma of a Cao Cao, but a gentler kind—a pull that drew people in and made them glad to spend their lives for him.
Before anyone quite noticed, the faces that had frozen at the news of Cao Cao's coming had melted into the heat of victory.
"Well? Does it not begin to feel as though we might just manage it?"
He had made the full round of the hall and stood once more before the seat of honor, and at those words every man became one heart, one face, one will, and cried out.
"It does!"
Shocking as the news of Cao Cao's advance was, our spirit only climbed. But the same truth applied to the enemy. From here on, the Wei army would fight as men with their lives in their teeth. Xiahou Yuan, their commander-in-chief, would burn with rage at a kinsman's death, and the soldiers would hold on in the hope that if they endured only a little longer, the relief force Cao Cao himself was leading would arrive.
The banquet was over.
From here on, the true battle began.
