The Battle for Hanzhong
After the near-unbelievable triumph at Mount Dingjun, where they cut down both of Wei's commanders, Liu Bei's army had nothing left to fear.
We marched straight on for Nanzheng. Across the Han River, Guo Huai tried once to check us from ambush, but he could not stop us from reforming our ranks and crossing in good order.
Nanzheng fell into our hands the moment we arrived.
It was no bloodless entry. Guo Huai, who might as well have been called Wei's commander by then, had chosen to abandon Nanzheng County and hold the roads that ran to Chang'an, yet Wei troops still remained in the city.
The boy standing before my eyes was one of them.
"Hah... hah..."
He was gasping, wounded in a dozen places, as if he had already fought his way through one clash. Fine features and immaculate clothes made his noble birth plain at a glance.
Even so, he was only a boy in his teens. Unless one were an irregular like me, he was the sort of opponent ordinary soldiers could finish on their own. No—if even I had fought one against many at that age, a gruesome death would have been all but guaranteed.
So why was this boy still standing? The answer lay in his blood.
"So this is why you called me."
"Yes, General. Enemy though he is, he shares your blood. How could we dispose of him as we pleased?"
Right. The boy's name was Xiahou Rong—fifth son of Xiahou Yuan, and to me an uncle of the fifth degree on my mother's side.
Ma Zhong had done it with me in mind, but it was a plain breach of military law. If an enemy had not surrendered, the proper course was to kill him at once or take him prisoner. Ma Zhong could not have failed to know that. He had simply chosen to take the risk for my sake.
Devotion past the proper measure is a burden, though.
Still, now that it had come to this, I could hardly look past it. I walked by the soldiers and stood before Xiahou Rong.
"You—!"
"So this is our first meeting, Uncle. I have seen the second of my uncles on your side before."
"I have no wish to be called uncle by the likes of one of Liu Bei's underlings! I won't beg for my life. Kill me and be done with it!"
How deep does a son's resentment run, once he has lost his father?
Xiahou Rong was not like the Xiahou Ba I had met before. Xiahou Ba had looked at me and seen his own mother, and there had been pity in his eyes. In Xiahou Rong's gaze I felt nothing but hate.
"I have already finished laying out my grand-uncle."
"Father's..."
"I will leave the bearing of his body to you."
To lay a body out is to wash it, dress it in grave clothes, and bind it in a shroud; to bear it is to carry that body away. In other words, I was telling him I would let him live.
Xiahou Rong, famed for his brilliance since childhood, understood and lowered his sword.
This was an age that set filial piety above loyalty. To receive a parent's body back was held a greater virtue than to die keeping one's integrity for the state.
I could not know what danger might come of sending a prodigy like Xiahou Rong safely home to Wei. He was a late-born child besides, and had never once met my mother. Even so, I did not want to kill him.
The paltry excuse—that I hoped to earn a little of Xiahou Ba's goodwill and hasten his defection—was a lie. This was my own selfish atonement for having known Xiahou Yuan would die, and having stood by and let it happen.
"Why..."
Perhaps he was still too young. Xiahou Rong could not master the feeling surging up in him, and at last tears stood in his eyes. Not to let them fall must have been the last of his pride.
"We are family. The same blood runs in us..."
Kin of the fifth degree are close. Even in the twenty-first century, one still finds such relatives who keep a familiar warmth between them. In an age that reckoned even a whole clan as a single household, a bond of the fifth degree was truly near.
But I had family closer still.
"Because my father is Zhang Fei."
"It was a foolish thing to say. Forget it."
I glanced at the men supporting Xiahou Rong from behind and turned the talk aside.
"Are the people behind you of the household?"
"Servants."
"I'll allow them as well. Arrangements will be made. Take my grand-uncle's body and go."
With that, I turned my back on Xiahou Rong.
I had done all I could do for him. Anything more would have been too much even for me, and my standing had risen on the great merit I had just won. They say that when Liu Bei saw me come back with Zhang He's head, he cried that Huo Qubing himself had returned and even hoisted me up in his own arms—but there is a line. This decision, too, was one in which I had already accepted no small risk.
Sending Xiahou Yuan's body back was something my father had approved, so it would have happened regardless. Sparing Xiahou Rong was another matter.
"Dexin."
"Yes, General."
"Don't do this again. Conduct yourself by military order."
"...I'll bear it in mind."
Let this fault of Ma Zhong's be mine to carry. I had warned him once. He would not make the same mistake again.
Liu Bei honored my decision. Xiahou Yuan's body was given over to Xiahou Rong, and the boy left Nanzheng without a word, bound for the Wei camp.
After that, Liu Bei gave himself to soothing the hearts of Nanzheng's people. He already carried himself as though Hanzhong were wholly his.
Well, he wasn't wrong. Even if Cao Cao came, driving Liu Bei out of Hanzhong had passed into the realm of the impossible.
Cao Hong, Xiahou Yuan, Zhang He. The deaths of those three veteran generals meant more than a lost battle. Their deaths were the collapse of the region's defense entire, and Liu Bei, holding Hanzhong's vital ground, had only to draw a line and stand the siege. Supply through the rugged Qinling has its limits. Cao Cao would wear himself out and have no choice but to turn back.
Even so, Cao Cao moved.
Not because he was sure of victory. From where he stood, retreat was no longer possible. Cao Hong, Xiahou Yuan, and Zhang He were dead, and Hanzhong had been taken from him. He knew how hard victory would be. Even so, the choice of coming all the way to Chang'an only to do nothing and go home had never existed in the first place.
It was a matter of pride. It was also a matter of the cause he could claim. And beneath it, in the depths of Cao Cao's heart, lay the quiet sense of superiority he had always held toward Liu Bei, and a fury driven to its limit by the loss of kinsmen one after another. Reason and feeling alike left him no road but the one that led into Hanzhong.
This was the same Cao Cao who, in his rage at his father's death, had turned Xu Province into a hell of men and demons. Would such a man sit still after losing two kinsmen who had been with him from the days when he had nothing? That would no longer have been Cao Cao.
Even at word that Cao Cao was coming down, Liu Bei did not waver.
Confidence filled his voice. Unlike at the banquet at Yangping Pass, this was a certainty without a tremor in it.
Separate from that confidence, he drew the army back from Nanzheng. He judged it more advantageous to hold at strongpoints such as Yangping Pass and Mount Dingjun than to remain in the city.
Cao Cao, by contrast, came down like a flood. Beginning with the remnants Guo Huai had gathered, Xu Huang, Cao Xiu, Cao Zhen, and the rest joined Cao Cao's main host and swelled its bulk, until at last, when the armies faced each other at Yangping Pass, Cao Cao's force numbered seventy thousand. Our own strength, even after the reinforcements Zhuge Liang had sent and every scattered man we could scrape together, was barely fifty thousand.
Allowing a little exaggeration, a host half again our size was merely what Cao Cao had managed to gather in his haste. Had he been given more time, he might have come not with some airy boast of a hundred thousand, but with a true hundred thousand at his back.
This was the mobilizing power of the Central Plains. That he could draw out an army of this size with ease, even while contending with Guan Yu in Jing Province, Sun Quan in Yang Province, and the tribes of the north, was enough to raise the hair on one's neck.
"But quality will fall by just that much."
Cao Cao would know that flaw in Wei's army as well as anyone. That was why he had to force a swift decision. And yet the Art of War had already said it.
He who is furious and hasty may be humiliated.
A commander who prizes nothing but anger and speed is bound to meet with disgrace. Cao Cao's fate would be no different.
This was Cao Cao, who had mastered the Art of War so thoroughly that he wrote a commentary on it himself. Knowing every ill condition the military classics warned against, he set his foot on the road that led him to face Liu Bei all the same.
A single rider from the Wei army approached our lines beneath a white flag. An envoy. The man Cao Cao had sent was led at once to Liu Bei and met him amid the assembled generals.
"I am Yang Xiu, Registrar, sent as envoy by the King of Wei."
Yang Xiu, who served as the mind behind Cao Cao's third son, Cao Zhi, faced the fierce generals who looked down on all the world, and Liu Bei borne upon a heavenward current, and did not lose his composure. At a bearing no ordinary man could have managed, Liu Bei let out a small breath of admiration.
"As expected—Cao Cao keeps no shortage of talent at his side. Yang Xiu, was it? Well then. What did Cao Cao have to say to me?"
"He asks that at noon tomorrow you share what was left unsaid at the Discourse on Heroes."
The Discourse on Heroes—where Cao Cao, speaking of the heroes of the realm, had talked with Liu Bei. There Liu Bei had dropped his chopsticks and played the coward, hoping to slip free of Cao Cao's suspicion. But Cao Cao's foresight had not missed. The countless warlords had fallen, and now only three remained. And in this moment, beyond all doubt, those two were the protagonists of the age.
"Tell him I understand."
"Then I will withdraw."
Yang Xiu returned to the Wei camp without delay.
When the next day's sun stood at the crown of the sky, Cao Cao and Liu Bei walked out to the ground between the two armies with only a small escort. The guards Liu Bei brought were my father and Zhao Yun. He had chosen, it seemed, the men he trusted most, and whose fame stood highest. On the other side, Xu Chu and Xu Huang flanked Cao Cao. The faces over there were nothing to take lightly.
"How do you think it will go?"
Fu Qian spoke in a tense voice, his eyes fixed on Liu Bei. The heads of each power were holding a parley with only two guards apiece. It was not Fu Qian alone whose every nerve was drawn tight toward that ground.
"In the end they'll fight, won't they?"
"They will. Cao Cao has lost too much. If the result is that he marched in vain—losing, and gaining nothing—his grip on the Central Plains will suffer a grievous blow."
As Wang Ping and Ma Zhong said, both sides had come too far to settle the matter with talk and simply part.
When Liu Bei at last returned unharmed, what we had said became fact.
The command that left his lips declared that the reckoning with Cao Cao was not yet done.
And so the second act of the battle for Hanzhong began.